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A 
GIFT BOOK 

FOR 
MY MOTHER 

HARRISON 
RHODES 





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CQEffiJGHT DEPOSIT. 



A 

GIFT BOOK 
FOR MY MOTHER 



A GIFT BOOK 
FOR MY MOTHER 

BY 

HARRISON RHODES 




New York and London 
Harper & Brothers 

^fc M X X II 






A GIFT BOOK FOR MY MOTHER 



Copyright, IQ22, ly Harper l^ Brothers 
Printed in the United States of America 



©CI,A683242 



H-W 



SEP 16 '22 



A 

GIFT BOOK 

FOR MY MOTHER 



A GIFT BOOK 
FOR MY MOTHER 



THEY were building yesterday a 
preposterous small rustic bridge 
over what is little more than a drain- 
age ditch, though the gardener has 
planted it with the wild purple iris 
and set a Devoniensis rose to clamber- 
ing over the lattice that runs along 
one side, so that it is very pretty. 
The bridge is about four feet long and 
is really a quite absurd engineering 
operation, since even in the most 
tropical of Floridian rainstorms it 
spans a torrent only about four inches 
deep. We had, however, talked of it 
for days, and when the actual con- 
struction work began there were three 
men engaged in it — the gardener; a 
carpenter of the village, highly skilled 
in "rustic work,'* as the art is called; 
and the black chauffeur. It was a 
moment in which my mother would 
have excelled, directing her cohorts 



A GIFT BOOK 

with masterly generalship as she sat 
upon the patch of lawn near by in 
a small wicker-seated rocking chair 
which was set up, like the throne of 
Xerxes, wherever she marshaled her 
horticultural forces for weeding or 
planting seeds, or for such great mo- 
ments as this of bridge building; 
indeed, the spanning of the Hellespont 
would be no more important in 
Asia Minor than is the conquering of 
this shallow ditch in our garden. 
But, alas! for the third spring now 
the garden is without a general. This 
is why it gave me an odd turn yester- 
day w^hen, coming along between the 
orange trees to observe the great 
event, I discovered that the small 
wicker-seated rocking chair, the gen- 
eral's seat, had been placed upon the 
patch of lawn near by, though she is 
no longer here to sit there. 

Neither the gardener nor I said 
anything to each other about the 
** rocker." We understood, and there 
are certain things one does not talk 
about, especially if there are others 
by. I think he believes, in some way 
of his own, in her actual presence 



FOR MY MOTHER 

there. I believe less surely, and at 
any rate much more mystically and 
symbolically. But for both of us, 
and for my sister, too, the small green 
back yard is a haunted place. We 
all know about the rocking chair. 
When it rains, whatever may happen 
to the other garden furniture, this 
must be brought to shelter. Every 
night it, at least, must sleep in the 
woodshed. If it is ever forgotten 
we apologize to each other, though 
we do it in a businesslike way as if 
we mustn't be too sentimental about 
things. 

Yet the garden is forever haunted 
with memories, with such a cloud of 
them that I want to set some of them 
down in a haphazard, unpretentious 
chronicle which will have, perhaps, 
no importance to anyone except me 
(and of course my sister). Yet there 
may be some others who will like 
to hear of just simple happinesses 
and affections. It is, because 1 write 
it, a book for sons. It is, also be- 
cause I write it, a book for her and 
perhaps for all mothers. 

If indeed it should turn out to be a 



A GIFT BOOK 

book at all — which I can scarcely say 
as I start to write. Nor can I prom- 
ise that it will be much or mainly 
about gardens. It must be about the 
seabeach, too, when I now actually 
first put pen to paper. It is a blue- 
and-silver morning, with the sun 
slowly dissipating the light mist that 
hangs over the tide-drenched sands, 
by the side of which, on the dunes, 
stands my small workshop cottage. 
There is a bicycle on which I came, 
blue, too, by the way, and nickel if 
not silver. A sack as well, with 
papers and pens and ink. So per- 
haps there will be a book. The 
southeast wind is blowing from the 
Gulf Stream and the Antilles, and as 
often in the past, under the spell of 
this Floridian spring magic and in 
such soft airs, the world from which I 
have come, first on the railway train 
and then on the blue bicycle, seems to 
shimmer like a mere mirage. But 
memories are more real than this real 
world. Even the southeast wind 
cannot blow them away. 

Indeed, this loveliest of winds 
must always now and again remind 



FOR MY MOTHER 

me of her about whom and for whom 
I am to try to make this book. I 
remember just a day or two before 
she died in New York, when a rough 
bhzzardish stdrm was raging outside, 
and in the room where I sat by her 
bedside she was finding it hard to 
breathe, she said to me that she felt 
if she could only be in Florida with 
the southeast wind a-blowing it 
would be so easy. We used to laugh 
at French people who exclaimed, 
^'Enfin, on respire,'^ usually when, 
driven by approaching suffocation, 
they had lowered a railway carriage 
window a full quarter inch. But that 
day we did not laugh. Here am I 
breathing, and she is not. Yet now 
she is — ^just because of this small 
speech of hers — she will be for me 
forever in the southeast wind. And 
for a while, as I think of her, all my 
life which was not concerned with 
her, and is not now, when she has 
gone, concerned with her, seems to 
shimmer like a mere mirage. 

Since she spent every spring for so 
many years in our insignificant gar- 
den and was its general, gardens are 



A GIFT BOOK 

a good and pretty entrance to the 
uneventful country of her life and 
ours where I am to play guide. 

We were, as children, brought up 
in an atmosphere of gardens. But 
perhaps if I am to be honest and ac- 
curate I should say back yards. 
Northern Ohio nearly half a century 
ago did not talk much of gardens, 
unless it meant vegetable patches. 
There was no gardener employed 
regularly to embellish our back yard, 
no cohorts for mother to direct. 
There was John Eck, who came, if 
we could induce him to live up to 
his contract, once a week to mow the 
lawn, front and back. My father 
was of an incredible incompetence in 
such matters, and his son had in- 
herited this quality. Yet because 
my mother had given me at my birth 
a small share of her passionate love 
of flowers I attempted, most ineptly, 
indeed (and my sister, in due time, 
as she stopped being a baby), to add 
some horticultural charms to the 
long, narrow yard with its nub- 
by and infertile soil. My mother, 
though she was younger then, was 



FOR MY MOTHER 

never physically strong. We were 
her cohorts of that day, but, with us 
only, she could accomplish nothing 
like that later Floridian beauty. 

A bed of ground in a sheltered 
corner facing south between the 
kitchen and the dining room was In 
earliest childhood my domain; as 
my sister grew up to a small spade 
and rake and trowel, I ceded a part 
to her, the less favorably exposed 
and less desirable portion, be it said 
at once, as befitted one younger and 
a female. The only permanent 
equipment of my garden was a patch 
of day lilies and a border of pink 
clove pinks which had been trans- 
ported in my tenderest childhood — 
and theirs — from my grandmother's 
garden in the country. My gar- 
dening lacked both dash and indus- 
triousness. It was done in a way so 
unimaginative and cowardly as to be 
In itself a confession of failure. I 
saved my pocket money as spring 
approached, and begged for a special 
florlcultural grant from the parental 
authorities, and then purchased, with 
a lavishness which varied with the 



A GIFT BOOK 

sum so accumulated, potted plants 
at the greenhouse, and set them out 
in my plot. I had no nonsense with 
seeds and cold frames and trans- 
planting; I just turned the plants out 
of their pots, finding the balls of 
earth with their roots in a matted 
mass a very agreeable sight, and, lo! 
my garden was. I was indeed a rank 
amateur. 

John Eck himself had a green- 
house, of lower prices than the one 
kept by a crabbed and frightening 
old fellow named Fehn, who, how- 
ever, purveyed more varied and 
rarer plants. I do not defend my 
gardening methods; they would be 
frowned on by all modern educational 
authorities. But I will say that the 
spring spending at the greenhouses, 
artfully dividing my money between 
Eck and Fehn, trying to get the best 
plants and yet hold the favor of each 
of them, was a very thrilling time. 
It might have been foundation train- 
ing had I ultimately embraced either 
a commercial or a diplomatic career. 

As time went on our ambitions flew 
higher. Mother had secured a cata- 



8 



FOR MY MOTHER 

logue ot a nursery near Philadelphia, 
and we attempted rose culture with 
named new varieties — I must insist 
that this was not a commonplace 
thing, as it is now; it was, for 
northern Ohio, novel, almost adven- 
turous. The roses were miserable 
little bushes and never throve very 
well. But I came to know La France 
and General Jacqueminot,which I pro- 
nounced in four syllables — Ja-quim-i- 
no, and somehow the horizon broad- 
ened and glimpses of a woxld outside 
the Western Reserve were to be ob- 
tained. The mere easy use of French 
words, even as I guessed at their 
pronunciation, gave a sense of per- 
sonal distinction, of a being, if not a 
man, at least a gardener of the world. 
There was in the catalogue a 
freakish and mysterious *' green rose" 
given as a prize when one bought 
twenty others. I insisted upon this. 
Its arrival was a feverish moment. 
It was not a rose in the proper sense 
at all; its flower was a mass of stiffish 
green leaves that were not of the tex- 
ture of petals.- It was (after all these 
years one may be honest) singularly 



A GIFT BOOK 

ugly, its only virtue being an odd, 
spicy odor which it exhaled. But we 
proudly made much of it and showed 
it to visitors as a rare exotic which 
we occasionally imposed upon the 
softer-natured as an object of ad- 
miration. There is philosophy to be 
distilled here, I feel, but I prefer to 
go straight on to the more disillu- 
sioned and cynical view of life which 
came to me with the quince tree. 

There was a so-called ''Japanese 
quince" with dark, brilliant-red flow- 
ers set thickly along a brown branch, 
but I do not mean that. My father, 
as suited a grown-up man, had a 
broader vision of the back yard. 
He saw it as an orchard, and in an 
expansive moment he ordered little 
fruit trees which he left to mother to 
have planted out. There were cherry, 
apple, peach, and one quince, and we 
made two rows of them. They all 
did very badly except the quince, 
which was a most intrepid tree, 
flowered prodigiously every spring, 
and almost broke in the autumn 
under the weight of its hard yellow 
fruit. But the thing which gave one 



10 



FOR MY MOTHER 

the gravest doubts of the wisdom 
of Providence and of its kindliness 
was that we all longed for cherries, 
peaches, and apples, while none of us 
could ^' abide" quinces. Yet quinces 
were what fortune showered on us. 
The questions here raised have never 
been answered to my satisfaction to 
this day. I got a hint, however, of 
the great doctrine of compensations 
when a cousin named Mary Bentley 
came to live for a time with us, and 
we children discovered that it was 
quince seeds put to soak in water in 
a saucer which produced the muci- 
laginous balm which enabled Cousin 
Mary to paste her hair down in mar- 
velous parallel "waves," as they 
were called, and to adorn her smooth 
white temples with the flat, almost 
imperishable, locks of hair, like hooks, 
which were so agreeably termed 
"beau-catchers" then. Certainly 
there was a beau caught and ulti- 
mately married, and I had a momen- 
tary vision of the possible place of 
the quince in the scheme of creation. 
But so much wisdom was almost 
oppressive to a child so young. 



II 



A GIFT BOOK 

Part of the masculine "wider 
vision'* for the back yard was its 
availabihty for producing food sup- 
phes. At my father's request offers 
to buy fresh vegetables were made 
me by the kitchen, and every year in 
a remoter and even more infertile 
part of the yard I constructed a few 
beds. I usually heaped them so 
high that they looked painfully like 
graves, which indeed they were — ^of 
hopes. For by some strange fatality 
radish culture seemed my only suc- 
cess, and that root or tuber or what- 
ever it may be, produced such a 
general indigestion in the family 
that the whole question of the 
advisability of vegetable raising 
remained unsolved. In this matter 
my mother remained serenely non- 
committal, but somehow one felt 
that her doctrine was being driven 
home, that the service of pure beauty 
as represented by flowers was even 
more valuable than that of utility, 
which radishes stood for. Perhaps 
there is no need to linger in that 
back-yard garden, although I long 
at least to celebrate the admirable 



12 



FOR MY MOTHER 

stove and oven combined which I 
used to build of brick, and in which 
the boys of the neighborhood roasted 
potatoes and occasionally the succu- 
lent and saucy English sparrow laid 
low by a sling shot. (I was glad to 
recognize this bird years later in an 
expensive French restaurant in Chi- 
cago as a mauvlette.) 

My father was a better walker 
than my mother, and so more de- 
voted to country rambles, in which I 
participated, quite like a grown man, 
so I fondly imagined. And on these 
excursions I knit some of the strong- 
est ties which now bind me to the 
generation which preceded me, to 
that notable period of American his- 
tory which precedes and includes the 
Civil War; indeed, to the very 
sources of that Americanism which 
so many of us long to recapture now. 

This book — I seem to be assuming 
that it will turn out to be a book — 
will be, it is probably already evi- 
dent enough, very personal. Yet I 
would like to feel that in the por- 
traits of those whom I knew and 
loved best in that generation which 



13 



A GIFT BOOK 

preceded us (who are now middle- 
aged ourselves) I had in some sense 
made a picture of their great time in 
America. If we can and will remem- 
ber our immediate predecessors we 
shall drink at the clearest fountains 
of national pride. Great days were 
theirs of simplicity and frugality, of 
eager life and unquestioning patriot- 
ism. Great days of war and of Abra- 
ham Lincoln. Are not we, who are 
their sons and daughters, most highly 
privileged because we inherit di- 
rectly their traditions, have heard of 
them at our parents' knees? Were 
there not grandparents, too, and at 
their beck did not mistier figures 
from a still earlier America step forth 
and become real for us.^* 

I would like to ask my brothers 
who were children in the 'seventies 
to remember that to us were handed 
torches lit at great fires in America. 
If dark days shall come to our coun- 
try we must at least lend some of the 
light in which our fathers lived, 
strove, were happy, and then died. 

Nothing in the history of one's 
country is too trivial to be worth 



14 



FOR MY MOTHER 

setting down somewnere. Particu- 
larly in America, where civilization — ■ 
at least so called — is forever slowly- 
spreading over the whole land, are 
all k'nds of minor dates in danger of 
being lost. When did olives arrive in 
northern Ohio and when did we stop 
dressing lettuce and tomatoes with 
sugar and vinegar? Have we all 
stopped? Such matters, if I could 
remember them accurately enough, I 
would brazenly set down, believing 
them of some importance some day 
to some one. 

A history of the progress of domes- 
tic decoration and taste should be 
written by some one. And bad taste 
is as significant — and perhaps as 
important historically — 'as good. My 
mother, as her mother before her, 
and as in fact most American women 
(not always their husbands), stood 
eagerly waiting for the novelties in 
art as they slid down the western 
slope of the Alleghanies. We never 
had a gilded milking stool in the par- 
lor, but we did possess a Chianti 
bottle painted with iridescent colors 
and :adorned with a blue bow. 



IS 



A GIFT BOOK 

I can remember, through seeing 
my mother engaged in the enter- 
prises, first of all "air castles'' con- 
structed of perforated cardboard and 
beads; then a strange rough hempen 
lace called, I seem to remember, 
macrame, though I doubt whether 
there is such a word in French. 
Then rickrack, wasn't it a braid? 
And repousse brass — there was a 
panel of iris framed in red plush 
which for a considerable period 
adorned the parlor. And in an inter- 
lude what I seem to have called 
"scratchella" painting done on vel- 
vet with a skewer. And in due time 
** Kensington" embroidery and cat- 
tails in a Japanese jar, the far wash 
of aesthetic London. Every Ameri- 
can family has such an art history, 
certainly in the Middle West. It is 
comic, but I like it. I think it gay 
and gallant, too. And through it 
all, American women, my mother 
among them, were making their way 
to a true love of beauty in which, 
give them time, they will be excelled 
by no women in the world. 

This will be a book about a 



i6 



FOR MY MOTHER 

thousand things, though chiefly my 
mother. And in writing of her I 
have another wish, of which I must 
speak humbly. My father went 
when I was seventeen. My mother 
Hved on till I was approaching 
what had been my father's age. I 
have never married, and in the years 
that went by my relationship to my 
mother stands, among many happy 
relationships, as the best. It is not 
always so in families, that I know. 
And last summer, under a pine tree 
by the edge of the blue waters of 
Long Island Sound, a tried and dear 
friend of mine asked me if there were 
any secret of the relation between 
mother and child which I could share 
with her. Her mother and she had 
not always understood each other, 
and she wondered, and her eyes 
grew wet, whether her own children 
would grow up always to love and 
to understand her. If by chance I 
have any secrets I would like to tell 
them. 

It would be arrogance to say of 
any friendship or relationship of 
one's own that It was perfect. And I 



17 



A GIFT BOOK 

know that even for what share of 
perfection came to me I have no 
concrete, easily discovered secret. 

I can perhaps, however, suggest a 
partial formulation of what family 
affection should afford one. The 
world is a gay, diversified place of 
contending interests. Happiness is 
to come home to some one (or to 
more than one) for whom you al- 
ways wish well, who it is incon- 
ceivable could ever wish for you 
anything but success and happiness. 
Here is something steadfast in the 
shifting phantasmagoria of the 
world, Gibraltar firmly set among 
the treacherous currents of life's 
tides. 

There could never have been in 
my mother's mind any conflict be- 
tween her children's happiness and 
her own; they were to her one and 
the same thing. It was not that she 
in the least sacrificed hers to us or 
we ours to her. Happiness was 
merely the unconscious adjustment of 
our varying interests; the balance 
had already been struck before she 
herself had ventured to formulate her 



i8 



FOR MY MOTHER 

own demand for happiness. I speak 
of her only; I would not claim this 
for us. Is this perhaps part at least 
of the secret of being a mother for 
which my friend asked me? 



19 



II 



IT is always pleasant to me to 
think of my mother and it feeds 
my pride to believe that many of her 
qualities were typical of the America 
in which she mostly lived and of the 
American women of that day. Her 
great sense of personal elegance in 
her clothes endears a whole century 
to me. Anyone who cares to browse 
in the innumerable books of impres- 
sions of and travel in America 
written during that so little remem- 
bered first half of the nineteenth 
century will find that however horrid 
and crude our visitors found the 
country, and particularly its male 
inhabitants, they had to admit that 
the ladies were beautifully dressed. 
Unsuitably, perhaps, the critics some- 
times maintained. They could not 
understand how in the vulgar pub- 
licity of the hotel ladies* parlor fe- 
males of refinement should choose to 
appear nightly in the latest and love- 



20 



FOR MY MOTHER 

liest toilettes from Paris. But why, 
w# may well ask, should the American 
ladies of that day or any other wait 
for the country to grow up to their 
frocks ? I think it one of the finest of 
our national traditions, and I boast 
that when my mother went away to 
school she had the prettiest dresses 
of any girl there. 

This was not because she was rich, 
though her father had probably an 
income of quite twenty-five hundred 
a year. He bought and shipped the 
cheese produced in the region around 
the little northern Ohio village where 
he lived. (He would probably be 
called a "cheese king" now, wouldn't 
he.?) There had never been, there 
never was even to the end, any tre- 
mendous amount of money for my 
mother's clothes. She regretted this, 
for she would have liked always to 
be perfectly w^ell dressed. If I can 
make it comprehensible, there was 
here, I think, very little personal 
ambition or desire for superiority. 
She merely thought every woman 
should always be perfectly well 
dressed, and thought it distinctly a 



21 



A GIFT BOOK 

woman's fault If she were not, or 
her husband's or father's if her 
failure were at all the result of lack 
of funds. Isn't that America? Isn't 
it precisely what we all really think, 
bless us? 

Nothing, indeed, could have been 
more firmly founded in my mother's 
mind than the duty of every woman 
to look her best. And when anything 
is a duty one has at once respect for it. 
To us as children it was interesting, a 
historical subject worth study, what 
mother had worn as a child. I re- 
member what a piquant paradox it 
seemed that she had never been per- 
mitted to have a high-necked dress 
until she was grown up. There are 
some extremely pleasant pictures of 
the little Adelaide with the childish 
gown demurely low over the shoul- 
ders. It is amazing of how remote a 
world such photographs already seem. 
Would a portrait of an Elizabethan 
child or of a small Roman of Caesar's 
day seem really any more old- 
fashioned ? 

Less than a half century will pro- 
duce the same effect of immemorial 



22 



FOR MY MOTHER 

antiquity. As I write there comes 
into my mind a picture of my mother 
taken when I was a child — and this, 
I must protest, is not quite im- 
memorial antiquity. She is in a mar- 
velous dress of black silk (I hope it 
would "stand alone") with a neat, 
tight-fitting bodice and a great, 
beautifully bouffant skirt of great 
puffs and cascades and Heaven knows 
what. Her hair is a marvel of puffs, 
too, and curls and ringlets, and she 
stands in a pose of incomparable 
elegance by a proudly isolated *' ped- 
estal" crowned by what would seem 
a gas jet in a lovely globe. This is 
perhaps forty years ago, yet if I 
didn't know her and you asked me 
to believe that she was, say, the 
Empress of the Brazils in the eight- 
eenth century, I should. 

If the ladies of our nation are ele- 
gant, are they not as traditionally 
good as they are beautiful? Is that 
not our special national blend .? There 
is a glass box with a curved glass top 
within which lies a lovely nosegay of 
cloth flowers, which was used to con- 
tain the childish treasures of the little 



23 



A GIFT BOOK 

Adelaide. There was chiefest of all 
a tiny glass mandarin duck in an 
attached black-glass boatlike sup- 
port which enabled it to float ma- 
jestically upon, say, a goldfish bowl. 
This was extravagantly admired by 
the little Adelaide's children; it 
still is. What should perhaps have 
been more admired were the school 
prizes, rewards of merit, ordinarily 
inscribed merely **To Addie, for 
being a good girl." These were 
usually just small cards, shiny and 
of an obvious elegance of quality, 
on which were painted little knots 
and garlands of bright flowers, the 
inscription written very small with a 
pen which traced a line of hairlike 
fineness. The writing of the day 
seems to indicate a ladylikeness 
which has quite vanished in modern 
life. Indeed, my mother's hand- 
writing expanded with the times, 
though it was never metamorphosed 
into the great scrawl of England 
which came so much into vogue with 
her sex in the late 'eighties. 

If my mother was good — ^and in- 
deed I believe she was — she appeared 



24 



FOR MY MOTHER 

to be quite unconscious of it. It 
was merely what a woman naturally 
would be — ^it was like being well 
dressed. I do not remember that she 
ever exactly taught or tried to teach 
her children to be good; she seemed 
merely to assume that of course they 
would be. There was a fear which 
haunted all American ladies of that 
day, that an accident should cause 
them to be conveyed to a hospital 
and it would be found that their 
underwear was torn or ever so 
slightly soiled. I imagine that any 
of life's accidents which might have 
disclosed an ever so slightly sullied 
morality would have seemed in the 
same class. It was a thing to be 
guarded against by the simple ex- 
pedient of being clean and good. 

Immorality, in all its varieties, 
there undoubtedly is in the world — 
my mother would have gone quite 
that far in admitting the existence of 
evil. As she grew up — or perhaps 
rather as her son did, she came into 
contact at times with a varied world, 
that of the theater for example and 
the arts generally. It may safely be 



25 



A GIFT BOOK 

assumed that the people she met 
sometimes had not quite the stand- 
ards of the northern Ohio where she 
won the school prizes for being a 
good girl. She was very friendly 
with them, very undeceived by them, 
very understanding, very forgiving. 
That was the way they were, and 
perhaps they could not help it; and 
they had other excellent qualities 
and charm and gayety and many 
things which go to make life agree- 
able. She was indeed glad to see 
them when they wanted to see her. 
But her relationship to them all 
seemed also comic to her. If a fa- 
mous lovely actress now living with 
her fourth husband rushed up and 
kissed her under the arc lights of 
Broadway as the theater crowd strug- 
gled for carriages, she was pleased 
enough, but she was apt to remark, 
as we drove away, that it was pos- 
sibly an unusual thing to happen to 
a daughter of Solon. (This was the 
northern Ohio village where the 
"cheese king's" father had settled 
when he went west from Connecti- 
cut.) It was pleasant to see all these 



26 



FOR MY MOTHER 

people, but of course it was not neces- 
sary to emphasize the fact that your 
own standards remained quite un- 
changed. Is this not just the way 
American women have gone through 
the life of different worlds and con- 
tinents, more especially Europe, quite 
understanding and often sympathiz- 
ing, but, to the despair and be- 
wilderment of foreigners, keeping 
their original standards quite intact? 
Marriage, whatever strange and 
comic things other people and these 
newer generations might make of it, 
was for her a decorous and happy 
relationship. I never heard my 
father and mother quarrel. It was 
to be assumed that it had been a 
love match, though this would not 
perhaps be just the thing one would 
tell young children about. Is this 
not America, too? We saw father 
and mother often enough with other 
men and women in the simple neigh- 
borhood society of those days, in 
Cleveland, at card parties and in- 
formal "droppings in" of an evening, 
and at occasional dances. But I 
never saw an instant's flirtatiousness 



27 



A GIFT BOOK 

on the part of either of my parents; 
no later-acquired knowledge of the 
world leads me to believe there was 
any such; it was not then dans les 
moeurs in northern Ohio. 

To a childish mind it seemed so 
certain that the affection of our 
parents could have no ending that it 
seemed as if it could have had no 
beginning. In the sense, at least, 
that the most startling discovery of 
my early childhood was that my 
father had been married before. I 
learned this by accident, I forget 
how, and that he had loved his first 
wife, who was, it appeared, a sweet 
young creature who had died early 
in their married life. It is odd, per- 
haps, that I never spoke to him of 
all this. It was not that I approved 
or disapproved; it was merely that 
my new knowledge made my father 
a mysterious, almost romantic, figure. 
It gave me a feeling that grown-ups 
had indeed lived as children cer- 
tainly had not. 

It inspired me in the end with the 
courage to ask my mother who was 
the original of a colored portrait 



28 



FOR MY MOTHER 

which hung modestly in the upstairs 
hallway. And she told me at once, 
with great simplicity, that it was the 
man she had been engaged to and 
that he had been killed during the 
war. Indeed, that was almost all she 
ever told me to the end of her life, 
though of course I gradually came to 
learn a little more. 

I realized that his sisters were 
called my aunts and his nephews and 
nieces my cousins. And to-day they 
all feel that it is only by the sad 
chance of war that this is not our 
relationship — though they all loved 
my *' truly" father. There was an 
enchanting Aunt Mary whose visits 
pleasantly punctuated all my child- 
hood. She had been a great beauty, 
and I imagine a great flirt, when she 
was younger. But a disappointment 
had come and she had never married, 
and she was growing old in a kind of 
gay, lovely tenderness w^hich seems to 
me, as I look back, to have so often 
been the way with what we called 
'*old maids" in those days. She 
was responsible for the rose culture 
because it was she who discovered 



29 



A GIFT BOOK 

the address of the nurseries near 
Philadelphia. And she did the love- 
liest embroidery which I came later 
to realize was like the detailed sward 
of flowers spread before the Virgin 
in a primitive Italian picture. She 
was deeply religious, yet her most 
engaging trait was a genuine wit 
which most quaintly manifested it- 
self in unbelievably apt and funny 
quotations from the Bible which she 
made at the most seemingly inapro- 
pos moments of life. I wish I could 
remember them — but then I wish I 
could remember the Bible. 

Once there came to visit us a 
mysterious lady from Cincinnati with 
her daughter. They seemed to be 
old friends of my mother's, though 
she had not seen them since the 
daughter was a little girl. Then I 
learned from them that when Augus- 
tus W — — • had been wounded and 
was brought from the hospital to 

Mrs. O 's house in the old part 

of Cincinnati to grow well, my 
mother came down from the north- 
ern part of the state to be with him 
till he recovered. He died, instead. 



30 



FOR MY MOTHER 

and I think perhaps he was always 
the romance of my mother's Hfe. I 
learned only the other day for what 
a long time she wore mourning for 
Augustus W — — : And after she 
died my sister showed me a silk scarf 
faded to magenta, part of a uniform, 
which had always been among my 
mother's treasures. We sent it to 
his family, but was it, after all, 
more theirs than ours? There are 
more than blood kinships. 

My father knew more of all this 
than I do. I have some letters of his, 
urging marriage, in which he so com- 
pletely understood. I still know 
very little. There is a packet of 
Augustus's letters, tied, as all such 
packets should be, with narrow blue 
ribbon. We have never read them. 
I think perhaps we never shall, 
though they will be treasured quite 
as of old. This was the only thing 
in her life of which my mother never 
talked to her children, though we 
can guess that, except for the final 
sorrow, it was all happiness. Both 
our parents seemed to have judged 
it wise to present to us merely a 



31 



A GIFT BOOK 

peaceful domestic picture, with no 
sorrows of youth which had pre- 
ceded final happiness. 

I Hked Augustus W 's colored 

portrait in the upper hallway. I 
came to have a feeling half filial for 
him. He looked dashing, and I was 
proud that he had died in the war, 
though equally glad that my father 
had not. He was, he is even now, 
one of my ties to that war. I 
think of him even now sometimes 
when people talk of the useless- 
ness of wars and the unworthy 
motives which drive nations into 
them. I still believe the war was 
fought, as far as northern Ohio 
went, from a generous and gallant 
wish to free a race which was held, 
unjustly, so northern Ohioans be- 
lieved, in slavery. 

As to what war does to individual 
lives, did it not give us a different 
father? This was the perplexing 
problem that I sometimes busied my 
child's mind with. It had endless 
possibilities of speculative thought. 
I only feel now that I should like to 
derive, if I could, from all the brave 



32 



FOR MY MOTHER 

Americans of that generation just 
before me. 

The O — ■ — s, mother and daughter, 
since they had hved, were a more 
comprehensible, if sHghtly less he- 
roic, tie with the war. Mrs. O — — • 
had grown fat, and she was an im- 
passioned letter writer. Even then 
my mother struck a most modern 
note and was ahead of the times in 
the matter of not answering letters — 
to-day the almost universal rule. 
Her correspondent in Cincinnati came 
invariably to commence her commu- 
nications with the sonorous and dra- 
matic phrase, "I cannot understand 
your long silence," which became a 
family catchword and was quoted in 
chorus by my sister and me for years 
afterward. 

If this sounds as if we "made fun" 
of mother, then this is the place to 
admit that it is so. We did, as we 
grew up, in quite the nicest and most 
affectionate way. I am proud rather 
than otherwise of it. I think the 
filial and parental attitudes are, as it 
were, interchangeable, and that as 
one grows up one begins to be nat- 



33 



A GIFT BOOK 

urally a little the parent of one's 
parent. If I may put it that way, 
my mother became, as she grew up 
— or down — a charming child to her 
children. We invented, when we 
were still in our teens, preposterous 
pet names for her which even here 
seem too foolish and too intimate to 
be set down. We were ravished to 
be able a little to protect her, prob- 
ably even more ravished at rare in- 
tervals to be able to make her obey 
us as — at rare intervals — we had 
sometimes obeyed her. As children 
grow older should not parents grow 
younger ? Should they not fairly soon 
become the same age and go on to 
the end, however that end may come, 
as companions, playmates? Is there 
not here perhaps some hint of that 
secret that was asked of me under the 
pine tree by the blue waters of the 
Sound .? 

I hope I seem to no one to speak 
of senile decay, for my mother, at 
least, never grew, except in certain 
bodily infirmities, old. It was not 
that she wanted to *' dress young" or 
to *' behave young." There was 



34 



FOR MY MOTHER 

never, so far as I could see, any 
abatement of a firm, though quite 
uninsistent, dignity which naturally 
increased with her years. But she 
was young and gay and interested 
in those who were young and gay, 
and interested till the very end. 

This tendency of mind has a dis- 
advantage; indeed I am quite willing 
to call it a fault. After my mother 
reached forty she began to find that 
her contemporaries were growing to 
be dull dogs; later she found them 
coming to be unpleasantly and un- 
reasonably old. She was bored with 
them. She found younger people 
fresher and more interesting. She 
behaved a little as if it were the fault 
of old people that they should grow 
old. Perhaps it is, when you come to 
think of it. Relatives who persisted 
in growing old she found particularly 
annoying; she felt almost respon- 
sible for them, though she knew it 
was really not her fault, but theirs. 
Yet since to say that anyone was old 
was indeed the final insult, she rarely 
used the word. No, she would say. 
So-and-so was not an old lady; she 



35 



A GIFT BOOK 

was only seventy. When she herself 
was seventy she thought possibly 
there might be old people of eighty. 
When she was seventy-five the aged 
had come to be those of eighty-five. 
She herself did not look young; her 
hair grew a soft and lovely white 
and her face wrinkled with wisdom 
and long years. But there was al- 
ways a patch on her cheeks of the 
same color which had stained those 
of the good little Adelaide at school. 
And within, her heart was blithe, as 
hearts are not always, be it said, 
even when the breasts that inclose 
them are young. 

Perhaps part of the secret of being 
a mother is to keep oneself young; 
perhaps the secret of being a good 
child is to aid in this lovely conser- 
vation. The Chinese more than any 
other race have thought and felt 
deeply on these questions of filial 
piety. There is a whole literature, 
so they tell me, of instances of how 
good sons behave. Of the few stories 
from the Chinese I know there is 
one of a middle-aged man whose 
father and mother had grown to be 



36 



FOR MY MOTHER 

so very old that their minds had 
crumbled within them until their 
only feeling was one of sorrow at 
their great age. And to relieve this 
the son, bent and middle-aged though 
he already was, procured for himself 
toys and, though he did so awk- 
wardly, romped and played before 
his parents like a very young child, 
so that they might have the sweet 
delusion that they were young and 
in the first happy years of their mar- 
riage. The people of the village 
mocked and scoffed at him, yet he 
persisted, and his parents, very old, 
died still young. As a rule of con- 
duct this would set an exaggerated 
and ridiculous standard. Yet there 
is something poignant about the 
story's ingenuous simplicity. There 
seems to lurk in it some profound 
philosophy of how the family tie 
should bind us closely together to 
fight off the threat of that unknown 
beyond old age toward which our 
paths lead. 

The adaptability of American wom- 
en is, it has long been recognized, 
one of their most amazing character- 



37 



A GIFT BOOK 

istics. As is undoubtedly already 
evident, this is to be no record of a 
brilliantly diversified triumphant ca- 
reer; indeed, it is the peaceful record 
of one who lived content with ob- 
scurity. Yet if we remember the 
quiet northern Ohio village where 
were my mother's origins, it will be 
easy to see that in many circum- 
stances of her uneventful life she was, 
to employ the chaffing and affection- 
ate phrase we always used, "the 
first daughter of Solon'* to have 
ventured so far into the great world. 
As she stood beneath the dome of 
St. Peter's at Rome, or motored up 
Riverside Drive in New York to 
dine at Claremont, or was admitted 
to visit a harem in Algiers, we chil- 
dren always boasted shamelessly that 
she was indeed that *' first daughter" 
to whom this adventure had come. 
She always agreed to this, wholly 
without pride, because it was so, 
although she was sometimes assailed 
by doubts as to whether a certain 
Frances (commonly called Frankie) 

M , w^ho had married in Chicago 

and, it was thought, might have 



38 



FOR MY MOTHER 

traveled, had not, perhaps, sometimes 
had this great distinction of being 
the first daughter of Solon to buy, 
shall we say, a Paris hat in the Rue 
de la Paix. 

Are family jokes always silly? I 
suppose they are. There was an- 
other extremely elaborate one, a 
sort o^ pendant to the first-daughter- 
of-Solon joke, which I despair of 
making seem comprehensible, least 
of all funny, to anyone. There was 
all these years a dearly loved cousin 
of my mother's, named Alice, who 
was living in the sleepy, already de- 
caying, village, and seemed, indeed, 
the last daughter of Solon ever 
likely to leave it and go forth. It 
was on this fact that the soi-disant 
joke was founded. If, for example, 
we drove up the long ridges that lead 
to Monte Oliveto, south of Siena, we 
would remark that it was the most 
probable thing in the world that we 
should find Alice had already been 
there a month and was a great con- 
noisseur of the famous frescoes. 
There was a variant of this in which, 
for example, we protested to mother 



39 



A GIFT BOOK 

that she was wrong, that it was 
really not at all likely that if we went 
to sup at the Savoy in London we 
should find that Alice always had the 
table in the corner to the right of the 
entrance. All this was satirical, but 
if it had an object beyond permitting 
us to be nonsensical, it was with 
affectionate satire to point out to 
mother how delicious it was to be 
from Solon and now to be where she 
was. 

Isn't this all profoundly American? 
Doesn't Europe still make us all feel 
more or less that we are from Solon, 
and does it not add to the pleasure 
of imderstanding and appreciating 
and loving Europe to be so derived ? 
How many years Henry James affec- 
tionately and delightfully studied 
the impacts of Solon upon an older 
world. Nowhere else than in his 
earlier books is there a record of so 
many instances of our inexplicable 
readiness for Europe. How prepos- 
terous and incredible it is, for ex- 
ample, that when my mother came to 
London and Paris people discovered 
that she looked like Madame Rejane! 



40 



FOR MY MOTHER 

• 

No stranger, perhaps, than it was for 
me to hear as a child my mother tell, 
after returning from a trip to Cali- 
fornia with my father, how, when 
they had gone to San Diego, he had 
protested that he realized for the 
first time that he had married a 
Spaniard. Who but an American 
could ever come of purest New Eng- 
land parentage and yet look like a 
Spanish Rejane? (I remember on 
my first trip abroad — I was thirteen 
and had gone with my father, not 
my mother — ^I cried with homesick- 
ness at Edinburgh because a dark- 
haired, slender, white-faced lodging- 
house mistress looked, so 1 thought, 
like my mother.) Does the American 
air, while it makes foreigners into 
Americans, also make Americans into 
foreigners ? 

My mother never went abroad till 
she was over fifty. She had been re- 
strained by an excessive fear of *' that 
old ocean" and by the impractica- 
bility of leaving us children behind. 
She would not go with father, but 
when, after his death, we, being now 
a little grown up, I, indeed, having 



41 



A GIFT BOOK 

finished college, announced that we 
were going abroad, she came at last 
without a question. My maternal 
grandfather had gone abroad for the 
first time with me when I was seven- 
teen and he over seventy. Perhaps 
I come of a late-flowering stock. 
After that first trip, though she never 
lost her fear of that venerable and 
yet abhorrent Atlantic, she made the 
crossing many times. 



42 



Ill 

FOR an American lady of even 
over fifty, as my mother was, 
Europe is almost sure to be a forcing 
house. In her case it brought out 
suddenly all sorts of lovely tastes 
and appreciations. It is my belief 
that there are many Americans who 
have, as it were, dormant within 
them a sense of beauty, sometimes 
nipped by native chill airs and arid 
environment, yet springing to sudden 
life and growth under French or Eng- 
lish or Italian skies. It is this quick 
power of developing innate tastes 
which has brought about the aston- 
ishing transformation of our towns 
and cities during the last decade or 
two, the swiftness of which change 
must be wholly incomprehensible to 
any European — to anyone, in fact, 
who cannot understand about Solon 
and what it means to be its first 
daughter to see the fair, strange 
lands and lovely treasure houses 
across the sea. 



43 



A GIFT BOOK 

My mother's development was as 
fresh and delightful — ^as our own, 
shall I say? Except that I think it 
was more so, for I judge her taste as 
intrinsically surer and finer than ours. 
Of course, at her age, she did not, for 
example, plunge into the study of the 
history of the arts, nor did she wrestle 
with the languages with quite our 
shouts of glee. She was already, I 
can guess, a little tired. And here — • 
it was her graceful and distinguished 
manner of acknowledging her age — 
she said that she had children to 
learn foreign tongues and to struggle 
with the technic of traveling; she 
resigned that to them. She never 
attempted to speak any of the 
languages beyond that achievement 
of every American woman of asking 
for hot water wherever she may be. 
She gradually came to understand 
some French and more Italian. As 
for English, as pronounced in thf? 
rural districts or in Scotland, she 
always maintained that it was for her 
just slightly more difficult than the 
continental tongues. 

It was not merely as regards the 



44 



FOR MY MOTHER 

arts that her native adaptability 
showed. We were not — so many 
American families are not! — 'destined 
to shine in the courts of Europe. 
But all the everyday life of these 
strange peoples, as far as it lay open 
to our observation, we could study. 
To all this my mother brought an 
extraordinarily sympathetic and hu- 
morous eye. She never abated any- 
thing of her personal dignity, yet I 
can remerhber her observing with de- 
light a Venetian street festival in a 
remote quarter where gondoliers were 
dancing in the streets, or noting any 
of the thousand delightful minutiae of 
Italian life. I remember, the last 
time she was in Venice, the month's 
protracted and philosophic study 
which she made, while she sat eating 
ices or drinking tea in the Piazza, 
of the methods of the lace merchants 
under the colonnades — *' lace hawks," 
she technically termed them, from 
the way they swooped forth from 
their shops and seized any passer-by 
who had, to their keen eye, the look 
of a buyer. The chapter of such 
minor adaptabilities and compre- 



45 



A GIFT BOOK 

henslons would of course prove end- 
less. I could not choose instances, 
nor, indeed, tell why I remember 
them. I recall, for example, a spring 
in Geneva, when my sister was un- 
romantically laid low with chicken- 
pox, and my mother and I used to go 
every Sunday afternoon to some vil- 
lage festivity in the adjacent country, 
to see peasants dance and to drink 
a picholet of vin rouge, the pichoiet. 
being a local measure that now looks 
in memory ridiculously small and 
insufficient. Through it all she was 
in some incredibly delightful way the 
child of northern Ohio. We went 
once to North Africa, and I think the 
thing that most delighted and amazed 
her there was when in southern Tuni- 
sia, near the holy city of Kairouan, 
she saw the Arab farmers plowing 
with camels. She had, as the good 
little Adelaide, seen Ohio farmers at 
the plow; now she saw in Africa a 
custom the quaintness of which she 
was completely competent to ap- 
praise. She saw something in that 
camel silhouetted against the African 
sky which we of the later city-born 



46 



FOR MY MOTHER 

generation missed. It was an earlier 
America than ours smiling compre- 
hendingly at the holy city, and I 
felt, though I shall probably not con- 
vey my feeling to anyone else, an 
epic note — as if my country in this 
little incident ranged itself beside 
all the older civilizations of the 
world's history, and the great East 
linked hands with little Solon. 

Travel is a great developer of 
leadership; what little I have I per- 
haps owe to playing courier. My 
mother's leadership was intermittent; 
it was exercised only in emergencies. 
May I hint that here perhaps I come 
close to another of the secrets of how 
families may grow old — ^or young — 
happily together.? I remember once 
in Venice, intoxicated by the reading 
of the red Baedeker, I had projected 
a trip to all kinds of little cities along 
the Adriatic's shore and then across 
the hills to Umbria. It was all 
feasible enough — in the guidebook. 
The practical difficulty was that I 
spoke almost no Italian, and all the 
wiseacres of the Venetian hotel par- 
lors warned us that in these little- 



47 



A GIFT BOOK 

visited regions we should find no one 
who spoke either English or French. 
I hesitated, though I protested that 
my hesitation was due to my anxiety 
for the comfort of the ladies of my 
family. My mother may have sus- 
pected that in my heart I distrusted 
my own abilities, felt that I lacked 
dash, courage. At any rate, she said 
smilingly that she thought we should 
go. She was, after all, she asserted, 
the one about whose comfort I was, 
she assumed, chiefly concerned, and 
if she could risk it why could not the 
rest of us.f* 

We risked it. Never has an ex- 
perience been more salutary for me; 
even now I sometimes bolster up my 
courage with the thought of it. We 
had an enchanting trip, and — this is 
the miracle — I arrived at Rome a 
month later, speaking something — I 
fondly thought it was Italian — with 
a fluency and speed which I have at- 
tained in no other language except 
my own; the speed is scarcely equaled 
even in that. I decided to take les- 
sons immediately— a few might be 
needed, I was humble enough to 



48 



FOR MY MOTHER 

admit, to give the final polish. Alas! 
when my professore started to make 
me grammatical and Italian the 
fluency went, the pace slowed down, 
so that by the time I struck the sub- 
junctive and the passato remoio of 
verbs I crawled like a snail. But I 
had gained something of courage, 
self-reliance, independence, in those 
crumbling cities. I should like to 
pay my respects to the hotel pro- 
prietoi; of Pesaro, whose son I was to 
know later as a fashionable head 
waiter in New York. And to the 
parish priest — if he is still alive — 'of 
Senigallia who patiently endured a 
conversation in Italian for two hours 
with me while the express train, run- 
ning quite ten miles an hour, de- 
scended from Urbino to the plain of 
Foligno. 

I remember another time when 
my mother suddenly took the reins 
of the family into her hands. We 
had been spending the winter in a 
Paris pension^ modestly enough, God 
knows. I had just been graduated 
from college, and an aunt of my 
father's had promised to pay my ex- 



49 



A GIFT BOOK 

penses for a year abroad. Now she 
wrote that her own affairs had gone 
badly and that she must withdraw 
her offer. A family panic ensued. 
My father had been dead only a 
couple of years; we had not at all 
grown used to managing our own 
affairs. We were in even ordinary 
cases rather distressed and tremu- 
lous about them. We were at least 
determined not to go home till the 
year was over, but we did not see 
how we could afford to stay. My 
sister and I inclined to a passionate 
economy. We countermanded an 
order for a new and smart hat for 
mother, and informed her, with real 
brutality, I doubt not, that she must 
continue to wear a shabby old bon- 
net — -I think she never quite forgave 
us that. Then we packed her on a 
night train and, like war refugees, 
we fled to Geneva, where, so the ru- 
mor of those days had it, there were 
obscure pensions in which, out of 
season, one might live for almost 
nothing. 

The pensions did exist; to set 
down their prices now would only 



SO 



FOR MY MOTHER 

throw me Into a frenzy of regret for 
the cheap living of yesteryear. We 
estabhshed ourselves, and then the 
second blow fell, with the news that 
a wretched country bank in Missis- 
sippi in the stock of which was part 
of the tiny fortune my father had 
left us, had failed. This seemed the 
end, black despair. I remember after 
a scene of gloom I caught up my hat 
and flung out of the house for a soli- 
tary stroll by the lake's edge, to be 
recalled by my little sister, sent 
after me. They had actually been 
afraid, so I extracted from her, that 
I was going to make way with my- 
self. This suspicion, so foolish and 
ill judged, I asserted, threw me into 
a frenzy of angry rage and I came 
back to the obscure pension with 
wild words and reproaches on my 
lips. It was indeed the moment for 
some one to assume the leadership of 
our disorganized little family group. 
I had left my mother as plunged 
in gloom as any of us. I came back 
after a scant half hour to find her 
calm and smiling. She had a plan, 
she said. We were all, she feared, 



SI 



A GIFT BOOK 

inclined to be blue and depressed, 
and Geneva out of season was at 
best a dull place. She thought if 
we started for Italy the next week 
and had a nice trip there we should 
all feel better. I gazed at her in 
amazement. The Italian trip was, of 
course, what we all wanted, but even 
before the arrival of the second, or 
Mississippi, blow we had judged it so 
expensive as to be quite out of the 
question. Yes, she realized that, she 
admitted, but then, she went on, 
we hadn't then needed it so much. 
Besides, she went on in conclusion, 
and she laughed lightly, it "would 
all be the same in a hundred years." 
She was right, it probably will be. 
It was the phrase which, almost 
traditionally, indicated her most reck- 
less moments. It was gallant and it 
w as, I think, characteristically Amer- 
ican. We set our national standard 
of living where it seems decent it 
should be, and then somehow we 
find the funds. There is a kind of 
miserly and squalid economy, a sort 
of cowardly cutting of the coat ac- 
cording to the cloth, which comports 



52 



FOR MY MOTHER 

ill with that bright national optimism 
of ours which says that the best is 
not too good for an American. Our 
family best on that Italian trip was 
not too extravagant. (We lost the 
friends we started with, the second 
night out, at Pisa, because we would 
go to the cheapest hotel on the 
guidebook's list.) But it pulled us 
out of gloom which would have 
wasted for us almost half of our 
precious European year. And some- 
how the financial crisis adjusted it- 
self, as crises often will if you make 
it plain that you will stand no non- 
sense from them. 

I have a perpetual delight in the 
memories of our European adven- 
tures. It was fortunate for us, as in 
my wisdom of to-day I look back, 
that there was not always — almost 
never, in fact — money enough to 
allow us to go to the most expensive 
and fashionable hotels. That spring's 
economy in Geneva, though it came 
to so agreeable a tragi-comical end, 
was like a chapter in a story book 
as I remember it. For in such cheap- 
ish continental retreats still lurked 



S3 



A GIFT BOOK 

the English left over from the era of 
Dickens and Thackeray — ^almost one 
would say from the time of Miss 
Austen, decayed gentlewomen still 
feeding upon the Peerage and bravely 
having afternoon tea though the 
skies might fall. There was, too, a 
private hotel — ^boarding house, to be 
accurate — ^where I actually heard the 
"Battle of Prague'' played by a 
maiden lady who at the age of fifty- 
five was making her first trip away 
from her remote Yorkshire village. 
In such strange scenes my mother's 
dignified amiability made her quite 
at ease. And it seemed to her as 
remarkable to be the first daughter 
of Solon to visit them as it would 
have been to have been the first to 
stand on the summit of Mont Blanc 
— which of course she never did. 



54 



IV 



I SHOULD like to return this once 
to the native elegance of Ameri- 
can women, and the inelegance of 
American men. My father repre- 
sented another school of national 
thought, that of the instinctive dis- 
trust of '* style." In my maternal 
grandfather as well I saw the flower- 
ing of this deeply American tendency. 
One of my grandfather's favorite 
stories — it seemed to him brilliantly 
satirical — was about a man who in a 
fatal moment allowed his wife to 
buy a new Brussels carpet for the 
parlor, with the result that gradu- 
ally everything in the house had to 
be replaced in a style that "went 
with" the fashionable Brussels, until 
in the end the wretched protagonist 
of the ominous yarn had dissipated 
his fortune and ruined his life. The 
anecdote, though it was always ex- 
cessively agreeable to induce grand- 
father to tell it, had never exerted 



55 



A GIFT BOOK 

much influence over the ladies of his 
family. You may be sure that at 
the earliest opportunity my grand- 
mother had secured a floor covering 
purporting to come from Belgium's 
capital. American women were long 
ago on the march. Even in the little 
villages of northern Ohio they meant 
to move with the times. There was 
a dashing anecdote in our family 
concerning the first coming of the 
famous "Black Crook" to Cleveland. 
The legend was usually, of course, of 
fathers of families who suddenly 
found urgent business calling them 
to town, and there flew to witness 
the Amazonian marches from the 
front row. In our family it had been 
my grandfather who had set his face 
against such follies, and my grand- 
mother who had gayly gone to town 
for the Saturday matinee, just to 
see how fast the world was moving! 
My grandfather disapproved vio- 
lently of the "swallow-tail," and my 
father did not much like to wear it. 
He thought it quite suitable for his 
wife and him to start oflFto an evening 
party on foot, even in the Ohio snow^ 



56 



FOR MY MOTHER 

His wife would certainly have liked 
him to be claw-hammered and con- 
voying her in a carriage. Not that 
there were any quarrels over this; 
during the honeymoon my father 
had told my mother that if there 
were to be any quarrels in their mar- 
ried life she would have to make 
them. And it had not occurred to 
her that she could quarrel with her 
husband. Indeed, as far as I know, 
neither ever precipitated such an 
event. Perhaps both of them recog- 
nized in the other, as we may now, 
inevitable, though conflicting, forces 
in American life. I am extremely 
glad to have been placed to see both 
from the tenderest age; it helps me 
constantly to understand my com- 
patriots. 

Why do American — indeed, any 
women — dress well.? The question 
is old and there is no pretension here 
to having found a new answer to it. 
I would not say that my mother 
dressed for either men or women, 
but merely because it was the nice 
thing to do, just a natural and 
pleasant instinct. Of course she was 



S7 



A GIFT BOOK 

not like a woman of whom I knew 
later, who was content to dress 
superbly in a hotel sitting room, have 
her dinner in this magnificent soli- 
tude, and conclude a delightful eve- 
ning by planning in what gown she 
would dine alone the following night. 
Mother would have preferred that 
her children at least should see her 
if she were well dressed. But, 
broadly speaking, she had no other 
social end in view. 

In fact, quite apart from clothes, 
I do not think I ever saw her do any- 
thing with social success as its ob- 
ject. I will be honest, I do not know 
that I ever saw her attain much 
social success, so that we may, per- 
haps, as the world judges things, be 
touching on a fault. She was always 
pleasant to the people who came in 
contact with her, and among them 
she picked out with a very sure taste 
the pleasantest people, and would 
have liked to see them rather than 
the others. But she was what the 
French call very recueillie; she never 
made that step forward which social 
success perhaps demands. But there 



58 



FOR MY MOTHER 

are enough people in America mak- 
ing steps forward; it can do no harm 
to remember for a moment one who 
stood smiHng and unambitious where 
Hfe had placed her — in circumstances 
quite fairly pleasant, be it said. 

We were, however, talking about a 
pretty taste in dress — were we not? 
— my mother's and the American 
woman's in general. Dress for dress's 
sake is not a bad motto. Did they 
ever aspire to anything beyond 
perfection .? 

We children used to assert laugh- 
ingly that our mother had never 
seen a sleeve which wholly pleased 
her, and that she never really liked 
any dress until it was almost worn 
out, by which time usage had given 
her a certain affection for what had 
been inevitably a partial failure, to 
which a priori all dresses seem fore- 
doomed. Are women like that? Is 
there some radiant vision of being 
perfectly well dressed which always 
swims before them? 

To dress well and to live becom- 
ingly — ^this does not mean ostenta- 
tiously — seemed to my mother in 



59 



A GIFT BOOK 

those days part of woman's duty; 
she never questioned it. In these 
matters no qualms troubled her — 
did they trouble anyone then? — 
as to other women fated to dress 
less well and live less becomingly. 
We hear a great deal of talk of such 
qualms in these days, but do social 
and radical ideals seem to abate at 
all our twentieth-century ladies' love 
of dress.? However, I may as well 
admit that my mother had little 
social consciousness, as we under- 
stand the phrase in these days of the 
reconstruction of the world. And 
she was typical of the greater part of 
the good women of her day — a day 
that already to us seems centuries 
ago. It is because so many of our 
mothers were like this that I venture 
to speak of mine. 

She was incapable, I take it, of 
thinking other than kindly of any 
class in the community in the sense 
that she wished them to have no 
suffering and to enjoy a suitable de- 
gree of comfort. She was, when I 
was a small child, I can remember, 
as active as her health permitted in 



60 



FOR MY MOTHER 

the local Dorcas Society. Dorcas 
Society indeed! Does that not date 
the ladies enlisted in it? Does it not 
almost bring back the eighteenth 
century with ladies bountiful them- 
selves carrying baskets of calf's-foot 
jelly or arrowroot to old Goody 
Two-Shoes in her humble cottage? 
My mother never consciously put 
forth much of a plan for the better- 
ment of the world, beyond kindness 
to the deserving poor who came near 
your gate. 

She represented, as do now all the 
women of that time, a point of view 
which to modern people seems to 
savor of a dark age. And yet mira- 
cles do not exactly happen over- 
night in a nation's consciousness. 
I would urge that something in the 
social attitude of that day is not so 
remote from the most characteristi- 
cally American thought of our day. 
For example, my mother strongly 
disapproved of all slums; she de- 
tested even passing through them. 
But, oddly enough, as we of the 
younger generation thought even 
then, she did not waste time censur- 



6i 



A GIFT BOOK 

ing landlords and municipal author- 
ities; she merely blamed the poor 
for living in such horrid places. And 
if we chaffed her about Marie Antoi- 
nette and cake for the starving in 
Paris, she replied, with some show of 
justice, that the poor ought to go to 
live in the suburbs, where there were 
cottages and gardens, and that they 
should be educated to do that. 
Perhaps you couldn't destroy slums, 
she thought, but you could destroy 
the willingness to live in them. 
Isn't this sound, characteristically 
American, and really very modern 
doctrine.? 

She had that very American belief 
in the advantages of raising the 
standard of living, and when she 
came to live a good deal in the 
South she extended this doctrine — ■ 
as is not always done — 'to the colored 
race. She believed that if the negro 
lived better he would have to work 
harder — and to her both seemed de- 
sirable. She was pleased when her 
children became interested in a school 
for black girls in our village, and she 
sent her prettiest slippers, when they 



62 



FOR MY MOTHER 

grew ever so little rusty, to one of tlie 
colored teachers, an elderly woman 
herself, who had a very appealing 
elegance and quiet, ladylike distinc- 
tion. If we had suggested to our 
mother that her lovely slipper buck- 
les might stir unduly luxurious am- 
bitions in some young black girl's 
breast, she would have answered 
that if the girl really wanted such 
things she would, when she left 
school, work harder to get them. 
And in this point of view I have 
noted with amusement and pleasure 
that she was lately joined by Miss 
Pankhurst in England when the 
spendthrift tastes of the London 
workingwoman were under discus- 
sion. 

It never irked my mother that 
some of the modern social doctrines 
eluded her. As I grew older and ob- 
served the modern tendencies in 
myself with pride, I wondered a 
little that, since my mother kept 
abreast of the times in so many 
ways and almost seemed to grow 
younger as she grew older, she did 
not see, with me, that alleged wider 



63 



A GIFT BOOK 

horizon. Now that she is gone 1 am 
indined to be wholly grateful to the 
lack of social consciousness which 
permitted the women of her genera- 
tion so to concentrate themselves 
upon their homes and their children. 
I do not urge it upon the mothers of 
to-day. I only feel that it is well to 
find what we can that is lovely and 
touching in each period of the world's 
development, and that if it were a 
fault of my mother's which left her 
the leisure to be more intimately my 
friend I will not now complain. 

She would, however, in a way, have 
been the first to recognize that the 
restrictions put in her girlhood on 
women's activities had resulted in 
serious losses to the world — ^notably 
in her own case. She could have 
been — and she knew it — an excellent 
boss carpenter or mason or builder or 
contractor. Not that she did any- 
thing with her own hands — and is 
this not of the very essence of Ameri- 
canism? — but that she knew how 
things should be done. I remember 
once discovering her directing a 
bricklayer. 



64 



FOR MY MOTHER 

"Why, mother," I said, "I didn't 
know you knew how to lay brick!" 

*'I don't," she answered, with an 
agreeable crispness which increased 
in her with years. ''But I observe 
and I have used my mind." 

She had a passion for alterations 
and remodeling; it gave her more 
pleasure to fix over a house than it 
would have given her to build a new 
one. She was always wanting to cut 
a window or ''throw out" a bay or 
find space for a new bathroom, and 
our tiny house in Florida was always 
in metamorphosis. 

Directing labor seemed to her an 
admirable occupation for women. I 
remember how proud she was of my 
sister once when a black boy who 
had been beating carpets and so 
forth said: 

"Mis' Rhodes, if Miss Margaret 
had enough of us colored boys she 
could jes' clean up the whole world." 

1 am putting off as long as 1 can 
the confession that in all mechanical 
arts I was, as my father had been 
before me, a bitter disappointment 
to mv mother. How intolerably 



65 



A GIFT BOOK 

must competent women like her 
suffer from men who are not *' handy " 
about the house! It had always been 
the prerogative of the male, the 
proud insignia of his sex, that he 
could drive a nail straight. Indeed, 
perhaps it will always be. And here 
we had failed her. Sometimes it 
must have seemed to her my worst 
fault. It was not my worst fault — ■ 
she must have known that — but it 
was a fault that almost until my 
coming of age she could not be silent 
about. 

My worst fault really was, at 
least in the childish period to which 
I seem instinctively to be reverting 
again, *' being a good boy." It is the 
most unpleasant confession I have 
to make; it is perhaps the most 
degrading anyone can have to make. 
I say this not only because it is the 
truth, but because, I admit, I hope 
thereby to rouse interest in this 
rambling writing which will other- 
wise be to the end so lacking in sensa- 
tional disclosures. I feel that I am 
not wholly lacking in a certain star- 
tling courage in admitting how good 



66 



FOR MY MOTHER 

a little boy I was. My mother can- 
not have deceived or flattered her- 
self, she must have known I was, 
yet she bore with me with the utmost 
patience. 

The Autobiography of a Good 
Boy, if It could be written with brutal 
honesty, might stir readers, though 
they would think it too depressing 
and morbid, as it needs would be. 
I have no intention of setting down 
in completeness such a narrative 
here. But I would like to protest in 
behalf of all unfortunate good little 
boys that no one need think that 
good boys enjoy being good! They 
almost always feel what bad style it 
is, how offensive to any true world- 
liness or cultivated taste. They 
despise good children when they 
read of them in edifying books, and 
they think nothing of them when 
they encounter them in real life. 
But if a child is naturally honest, 
for example, or not quarrelsome, no 
one but those who have been good 
children can know how tragically 
hard it is for him to be bad. In vain 
the child tells himself how cowardly 



(>! 



A GIFT BOOK 

it is to be good — even at my pres- 
ent distance from childhood I have 
something of this feeHng. The con- 
scientious good child goads himself 
on to badness, not knowing, poor 
wretch, that badness is a gift from 
God which no struggles on his part 
can bring within his reach. 

The parent of a good child is most 
unhappily situated. A mother es- 
pecially can scarcely venture on 
urging a child to be bad, even though 
she secretly knew it ought to be. 
This will explain, I suppose, why my 
mother never very strongly urged me 
to be good and never very bitterly 
reproached me when I had attained 
a mild, tame half badness. I re- 
member how I once desperately 
engaged with several other boys in 
my first theft (I might perhaps pre- 
tend that this was the beginning of a 
splendid series, but I may as well 
admit that so far as I know I have 
only stolen twice). We nabbed two 
pigeons belonging to some boys with 
whom we were in feud, inhabiting a 
contiguous but inferior street. So 
far so good; indeed, some details of 



68 



FOR MY MOTHER 

the raid were to the credit of my 
inventive talent. But almost at 
once vengeance overtook me. The 
miserable birds we incarcerated in 
the loft of a disused barn at the back 
of our backyard. This accomplished, 
the whole affair ceased to interest 
anyone but me. I, their jailer, had 
to feed the dreadful greedy things, 
since my too tender heart would not 
let them suffer. Of course I was soon 
longing to release them, but, alas! 
all too cleverly, we had clipped their 
wings and made flight impossible. I 
had to purloin food from the house 
and buy grain with my pocket money; 
none of the other boys, who knew 
and despised me as good, would con- 
tribute a penny. I had constantly 
to invent pretexts for slinking to the 
barn. And worst of all, the pigeons 
seemed to be growing tame and fond 
of me. This was more than could be 
borne, and at the end of perhaps a 
fortnight I sobbed out the whole 
absurd story to my mother. 

What she really thought I suppose 
it was out of the question that I 
should know; to the end of her life 



69 



A GIFT BOOK 

my goodness — fortunately a little 
mitigated with the years — ^was still 
a subject upon which, in the interests 
of our friendship, we both preserved 
a decent reticence. I remember I 
asked wildly what, oh, what should 
I do, expecting, perhaps, reproof for 
my badness. But I know she only 
smiled a little and said that she should 
think that I would merely put the 
pigeons back in the place they came 
from and say no more about it. She 
even helped me make a plan whereby 
I, unaided by my former accom- 
plices, could convey the birds in 
secrecy, and so, incognito, make 
restitution. 

It was years before I had courage 
to steal again. This time it was 
from the house at the seashore which 
we took furnished. There I pur- 
loined, with the knowledge and I 
suppose the acquiescence of my 
mother, a corkscrew, presumably 
from gay Paris, the handle of which 
was made by a lovely pair of female 
legs striped crosswise as if they wore 
a maillot of bright green and black. 
I trust it was with satisfaction that 



70 



FOR MY MOTHER 

my mother observed my now greater 
aplomb and ease in badness. But 
even now I have occasional twinges 
of conscience, and if the lady from 
whom we took the house, whose legs 
they are, will write to me I will send 
them back. 

My mother, it must be evident, 
made very little fuss about life. It 
was, I think, an engaging trait. I 
had, not so long ago, a stiff neck 
which finally turned into a mild 
rheumatism and into an aching back 
which fretted me for some six months. 
I grew nervous, a little frightened, I 
suppose, and impatient. And I re- 
member how I exclaimed to her one 
day that I hoped I wouldn't have a 
pain in my back all the rest of my 
life, and how she at once replied, 
very cheerfully, indeed: 

"You probably will." 

It made me laugh, made me, too, 
see backaches in their true relation 
to the whole scheme of life. Mine 
suddenly became, what of course it 
was, a trifle. And when it left m.e it 
was scarcely noticed. 



71 



V 



T PROMISED earlier that this 
1 should be a book somewhat about 
gardens. But it can only be about 
one very small and unpretending 
garden; there is enough to say about 
that tiny patch to fill all the space I 
can venture upon taking. I do not 
envy people with large gardens; 
their riches of ground and their in- 
dividual rose bushes can never mean 
as much to them as they do to a more 
modest Candide. It is almost in- 
credible that there should be so 
much lore concerning just a village 
back yard. 

There is a sort of summerhouse at 
one side, overhung by a myrtle tree, 
thatched with palmetto leaves, and 
overrun with honeysuckle. The myr- 
tle is a lovely tree with drooping, 
wandering branches, but it is not, on 
the whole, as romantic as its name. 
Its real usefulness is that a spray of 
it in leaf, placed in a room, will drive 



72 



FOR MY MOTHER • 

away fleas. So they say. My 
mother once thought that the owner- 
ship of such a tree made it possible 
for her to permit a Boston terrier 
named Doctor to sleep in her bed- 
room. But she decided ultimately 
that the myrtle was loveliest growing 
in the garden and protecting the 
summerhouse — if it could, indeed, so 
protect — from a too abundant insect 
life. 

The summerhouse is really called 
the bosquet, because at a small fishing 
village near Trouville they used to 
call small green inclosures in the 
garden that. We wanted to call it 
after the chief pride of the Hotel des 
Parisiens, Le Parasol de Robinson — ■ 
{Crusoe is understood). But we 
couldn't in decency do this, because 
our bosquet was not really a parasol, 
which is inclosed on all sides by green 
coming down to the very ground, and 
entered by a small opening on one 
side, while our bosquet was acces- 
sible on two whole sides. 

There is a table in it with a pal- 
metto-trunk support and a top which 
was once natural wood neatly var- 



73 



A GIFT BOOK 

nished. It is now green, painted so 
in a sudden fine emotional and ar- 
tistic frenzy by a fellow named 
Ca^ille, who was a Frenchman and 
for a while our butler. He was old, 
rather falsely and badly preserved, 
yet he moved with great vivacity, 
and he confided to us that when he 
had served at the Cafe Martin in 
New York he was commonly termed 
by his associates a butterfly, le 
papillon. He was almost stone-deaf, 
which I believe a papillon is, and this 
rather pathetically had relegated 
him again in his advancing years to 
the humble position of bus boy. 
This, I imagine, stung his pride, and 
he accepted to come to Florida with 
us. 

He was the least important part of 
a menage. He had a wife named 
Jeanne, younger and much hand- 
somer than he, a high-spirited crea- 
ture who, five minutes after her 
arrival, asked my mother where the 
garlic was kept, and cried, melo- 
dramatically: 

**My God! a French cuisine with- 
out garlic!" 



74 



FOR MY MOTHER 

The poor papillon adored her, but 
not she him. She made no secret of 
it. She had in France loved the 
chef de gare at Nancy, but circum- 
stances, possibly his high social po- 
sition as station master, had made it 
impossible for him to marry her. 
Jeanne had in anger fled to Paris, 
and there, almost on the first caprice, 
married the humbly adoring Camille. 
We used to picture to ourselves the 
magnificent chef de gare, gorgeous in 
a uniform, and be sorry for Monsieur 
Butterfly. And much later, after 
they had disappeared into the limbo 
of servants who will not stay, and the 
German guns were pounding that gal- 
lant and distinguished Nancy, we 
used to wonder if at the gare a hand- 
some man, now middle-aged, stood 
bravely at his post. We wondered, 
too, if he ever thought of the good- 
looking Jeanne who, but for his pride, 
would have cooked so well for him. 

The adventures, even the simplest, 
of French people in America always 
give me furiously to think. Never 
did I view our simple Florida village 
with such a cold, disillusioned eye as 



75 



A GIFT BOOK 

under the Influence of Camille. I 
was going one week-end to Palm 
Beach, and Camille, as he carried 
my bag to the rather ramshackle 
local conveyance which was to take 
•me to the station, remarked, tem- 
perately: 

*' Amusez-vous bien, monsieur. On 
ne s'amtise pas ici." 

I was struck cold, as it were, in a 
moment. I saw what a desert of 
dullness to a Frenchman must seem 
an unsocial American village with 
nothing of the equipment which the 
smallest hole by the seaside provides 
for the Parisian en vacance. 

It was, indeed, on a plea of this 
same dullness that they left us. 

''What will you?" asked Camille, 
with the air of a greater world. "// 
ny a pas de casino, il ny a pas de 
musique, en somnie il ny a rienf 

The village has grown to a city. 
Ily a un casino et de la musique. And 
one might meditate philosophically 
on the stride that has been made in 
America during the last decade in 
providing small towns with des agre- 
ments. When people talk of the 



76 



FOR MY MOTHLk 

difficulty of inducing anyone to be or 
to continue to be an agricultural 
laborer I wonder whether there is 
not wisdom in the French system of 
small villages, from which the hands 
go forth in the morning to the farm 
a few miles away and return at night, 
if not to a casino and la musiquey at 
least to some social companion- 
ship. Now that the moving picture 
has become the supreme American 
amusement, it would be possible to 
make the smallest village habitable. 
If the world is to work harder, must 
it not also play harder? 

In a small garden you become 
acquainted with all your plants. 
There is a small, mossy-looking one 
near the bosquet which is called the 
''artillery plant," so the gardener 
asserts, because at a certain season of 
the year — always when she wasn't 
there, my mother remarked — if water 
is poured on it it sends up puffs like 
steam. It may be so; we tried to 
believe it was. It is always much 
pleasanter to believe everything the 
gardener tells you. There was an- 
other tree the leaves of which, 



77 



A GIFT BOOK 

*' mashed," were an excellent poultice 
for any *' risings," which meant boils 
and so forth. 

In a small-enough garden small 
events become great; I am sure 
there is some great secret of happi- 
ness hidden here. Bridging the ditch 
or covering an already existent bridge 
with a pergola upon which a cloth- 
of-gold rose used to attain the im- 
portance to my mother which the 
building of his pyramid may perhaps 
have had to Cheops. This, at any 
rate, is the way to enjoy bridging 
ditches! 

The birds drop a good deal of seed 
into a Florida garden, besides which 
are the "self-sown" plants which the 
gardener, who invests the vegetable 
kingdom with personality, calls "vol- 
unteers." I remember how, only a 
little while back, it seems, a slender 
sapling, bird sown, I imagine, pushed 
its way up by a favorite little bridge 
where we had filled the ditch with 
wild iris. This stranger was a 
pleasant-enough little fellow, but he 
was distinctly an intruder and my 
first impulse was of extermination. 



78 



FOR MY MOTHER 

But my mother, the essence of whose 
everyday wisdom was the avoidance 
of quick decisions, decided, after a 
night which brought counsel, on spar- 
ing him. Hers was a broader garden 
vision; she saw in the future a big 
tree giving just the green shade that 
this part by the woodshed lacked. 
Now when she has gone what she 
saw has come true. I sat yesterday 
by the sapling, now grown to the 
pride of its full strength. The spring 
had waked it and the tender green 
of its young leaves and feathery 
tracery of its fringelike blossoms 
were lovely against the cloudless 
southern blue. And there, in some 
sense that I cannot quite make clear, 
there in that vigorous life of the 
young tree was, for me, my mother. 
Is not this perhaps immortality, to 
have caused something to happen 
which lives on after you.? A slender, 
intruding sapling that you have 
saved? A cool shade under which 
those, perhaps, who know nothing of 
you may rest and be for a passing 
moment happier.? In this sense the 
small garden is, for her children, 



79 



A GIFT BOOK 

forever haunted. There is no plant- 
ing of rose bushes, no simple tracing 
of a border's edge by violets, no 
tangle of red rose and trumpet vine 
which climbs up to what was her win- 
dow, but tells me, who now must 
potter about her garden alone, that 
I am not alone. 

My sister believes a little some- 
thing in the communications that 
sometimes seem to come, through 
those attuned to catch them, from 
the newer existence. And oddly 
enough, the thing that would come 
nearest to convincing me is the ap- 
parent triviality of the messages my 
mother is said to send, one especially, 
for example, urging my sister, who 
has always nourished a kind of preju- 
dice against this flower, "to plant 
petunias.'* They gave color, my 
mother used to say, and placed in a 
discreet distance they made a garden 

gay. 

I have now some German petunia 
seed, the first, I think, that has come 
out of the enemy land. It is of that 
marvelous deep-purple flower — -veil- 
chen-blau, they call it — which we 



80 



FOR MY MOTHER 

had admired so at Baden-Baden. 
And if they bloom I shall perhaps 
believe the war is over. There are 
such things as mechanical aids to 
one's feelings. I am trying to bury, 
if I can, the bitterness of the conflict 
in deep-purple petunias. My mother 
lived through the first war years, 
and the proper attitude toward Ger- 
man roses was difficult to know. We 
were almost glad, I think, when 
Kaiserin Augusta Victoria lan- 
guished. It was, on the other hand, 
almost impossible to dislike Frau 
Karl Drusckki when she flowered 
white with huge magnolialike bloom. 
Even now, when war is over, I view 
with suspicion Freiherr von Mare- 
schall, who seems to carry on over the 
vicissitudes of a wet spring better 
than any English or French or 
American rose. And I find an omi- 
nous significance in the very bad 
condition — of Bon Silene. Unhappy 
Silenus these days! 

Somehow we came to think and 
talk of the inhabitants of my mother's 
garden as if they were alive; but are 
they not alive.? I have never seen 



8 1 



A GIFT BOOK 

anyone who loved flowers quite so 
much as my mother. If you wanted, 
really to hurt her feelings, you had 
only to suggest that she had been 
brutal or unsympathetic or cruel to 
one of the children of her garden, 
some rose or hibiscus or orange tree. 
If this sounds silly, I do not very 
much care. At the heart of all deep 
human aff^ections there is just this 
kind of fond folly. The things a 
mother murmurs to the child at her 
breast are foolish babblings, yet 
sacred. And lovers' talk is not all 
wisdom if you were to print it. And 
I am glad that even when we both 
grew up my mother's talk and mine 
would possibly often have seemed to 
outsiders like that chatter of fools. 

Let us go back to that young sap- 
ling which was saved. 

The process was part of our family 
history. As the tree grew up, to our 
intense delight it turned out that its 
indigenous name was — ^on account 
of its fringelike blossoming — "grand- 
father's beard." This preposterous 
appellation convinced my mother — • 
if conviction had been needed — that 



82 



FOR MY MOTHER 

her intervention had been right. 
But then about the fourth or fifth 
year, when the tree had attained a 
fairish size, it became the object of 
the impassioned attentions of a kind 
of woodpecker called sap sucker, 
who simply would not leave it alone. 
We drove him away with cries and 
sticks, and both mother and I de- 
scended to the childishness of talking 
to him and arguing the point. But 
unless some one stood guard all day 
long he was sure to be found pecking 
away at the trunk of his chosen 
friend. We did not begrudge him a 
sustenance, but we feared he would 
girdle the tree and kill it. But a 
certain wise woman, visiting the gar- 
den, told us that sap suckers, however 
elaborate a pattern they might etch 
into bark, never made the complete 
circle which destroys. And so it 
proved. For two successive years 
the sap sucker's love lasted; the proo 
of his devotion may still be read 
upon the tree's trunk, but he worked 
no harm. A mysterious instinct, not 
common in nature, I should guess, 
made him want to spare life and per- 



83 



A GIFT BOOK 

mit the tree to bear seeds, which 
should perhaps be carried by birds 
to other gardens, there in time to 
yield green shade to human beings 
and sweet sap to new generations of 
wandering birds. 

The birds know gardens well — I 
suppose as we know the pleasure and 
health resorts of men. I am sure, as 
they come north with the spring, 
some of them plan to rest a day or 
two behind our house There was in 
the garden next door a great mul- 
berry tree which one could go under 
as into a tent and find the green 
canopy hung thick with purple fruit. 
At the moment of the berries' great- 
est lusciousness there was for almost 
a week a great concourse of birds in 
the gardens, and they went round the 
great mulberry bush not only so 
early in the morning, but all day 
long, with a deal of chatter and gos- 
sip. My mother termed it the mul- 
berry festival; it was a date in her 
garden calendar like the vernal equi- 
nox. Everyone should have such a 
private calendar of the year, marked 
with the events that are really great, 



84 



FOR MY MOTHER 

like the coming of new asparagus and 
oysters, and the children back from 
school, and one's mother perhaps 
coming to town to visit her children 
and to dine about in pleasant restau- 
rants and go to the play. 

There are always great events in 
even the smallest garden. Blooming 
of century plants, for example, which 
fortunately happens every five or 
ten years, instead of every hundred. 
It is exciting to watch the great, red- 
dish flower stalk shoot up at the rate 
of six to nine inches a day almost as 
high as the house's roof. This blos- 
soming, it must be said, is the end 
of the plant. It withers down and 
leaves only a litter of tiny plants like 
it, the likeliest of which we choose 
and set in its lamented parent's 
place. The generations of century 
plants scarcely know one another. 
That is badly contrived. It is an 
instance of how we human beings 
have done well not to be vegetables. 

The garden's corners are filled 
with a large-leaved shrub with great 
white bell-flowers. It is called datura 
and it has always, I suppose, been in 



8S 



A GIFT BOOK 

Florida gardens. But we by some 
chance had not seen it until once we 
were in Algiers and saw it in the 
Jardin Botanique there, in a long 
allee with Algerians in wonderful 
Arab costumes walking gravely there. 
My mother, abetted by me, deter- 
mined that this lovely giant lily, 
which they called Justitia, should 
adorn the back-yard botanique in 
Florida. We got prices and florist's 
address and investigated questions of 
shipping and customs duties, and thus 
prepared elaborately for the order 
that should go another year from the 
Floridian to the African coast. And 
then returned to our village to find 
Justitia, inadequately described, so 
we felt, as datura growing in almost 
everyone's garden but our own. I 
feel as if here again a profound phil- 
osophical truth about life and gar- 
dens is just eluding me. 

A Frenchwoman, born and reared 
in the far Seychelles in the Indian 
Ocean and cast by the strange tides 
of life upon our shores to eke out a 
difficult existence by classes and 
conferences, found, growing wild and 



86 



FOR MY MOTHER 

unconsidered upon our sand dunes by 
the sea, a green herb which is in that 
remote East considered a rare table 
delicacy. It is called '* bred," and 
out of it she cooked a singularly 
distasteful dish which, eaten with a 
terrifically hot chutney, gave her the 
most exquisite pleasure. Here, too, 
one sees that same philosophical 
truth just around the corner. 

If, indeed, wisdom were our goal, 
doubtless much might be found in 
simple garden lore. Why, my mother 
used to ask, is the most delicate of 
begonias, the frail pink blossoms of 
which, borne on slender translucent 
stems, rest like a sunset cloud all 
around the bosquet — why, indeed, is 
this called a *' beefsteak begonia"? 
Is it because beefsteak from Chicago 
is the luxurious ideal of the native 
Floridian cracker for dinner? Why, 
we used to ask her, did she so value 
a potted palm, purchased at great 
expense, when it could scarcely be 
distinguished, except for its inferior 
beauty, from the palmetto scrub 
which grew wild everywhere? Far 
fetched and dear bought, my grand- 



A GIFT BOOK 

father would have sagely quoted! 
Why could house painters and such 
folk never see the beauty of her 
favorite tangle of red roses and trum- 
pet vine and star jasmine which 
climbed by her window to the roof, 
and there, so they asserted, harbored 
mosquitoes and tore down the tin 
gutters? 

The garden was often a battlefield 
between beauty and utility, though I 
scarcely know whether I can thus 
describe the regular yearly discus- 
sions as to whether the croquet court 
should be made into a rose garden. 
I think it was in the end spared to 
sport — a temperate form, indeed — 
because we sometimes played upon 
it a game called golf-croquet I had 
learned one afternoon in England 
from James Matthew Barrie, and 
because my mother once had met 
him there and wished, I think, that 
he was her son. 

The garden is just nothing at all, 
I suppose, but when the sea breeze 
coming from the Indies farther south 
pours over it, and red birds twinkle 
by, and ** mockers" sing, and roses 



FOR MY MOTHER 

(mostly pink — she liked that) burst 
into riotous bloom, it seems some- 
thing. At night in the late spring, 
as one looks out on its shadowy 
stretch, seemingly greater in dark- 
ness, and the west wind blows the 
scent of orange blossoms into the 
little house where she lived, and, if 
the moon is full, silly mockingbirds, 
deluded into the belief that they are 
nightingales, sing almost till the sun 
rises, it is to us who live in it a small 
patch of paradise. 

The gardener — have I already said 
so.? — ^believes in very truth that she 
walks there, and that sometimes 
early in the morning when the dew 
is on the lawn — we have lawns in- 
deed, rare in Florida! — he can some- 
times catch her voice giving him the 
simple orders of the day, that he 
shall trim a rose bush, or transplant 
spinach, or pull up an intruding 
pepper plant. It is just the humble 
routine things he hears that make 
me half believe in them. I know 
that if she lives she wants to know 
every detail of her children's lives 
and that she will want us to know 



89 



A GIFT BOOK 

that she thinks I had better plant 
petunias, and that my sister's new 
skirt, which the gardener's wife is 
constructing, would be prettier with 
two flounces instead of one. 

That is the kind of thing she 
would communicate to us, not some 
vague description of what life upon 
a higher plane is like. I know that 
if she can bridge the chasm it is for 
the simple purpose of being with us 
in each trivial moment of our lives. 
And there is no idle half hour of my 
existence when just to think of her 
is not the lighting of a flame upon 
the altar that she would wish. If I 
will let her, she will be in every rose 
I cut and in every shirt and sock I 
put on of a morning, living in some 
real sense in all the material world 
that is around me. 

Is it very diff"erently — I say this 
in all reverence — ^that one thinks ot 
God and of His saints, who color 
the universe, if one will let them, with 
something of comradeship and love? 
Now that she who was the first 
source and fountain of my life is 
gone, I feel sometimes that I am left 



90 



FOR MY MOTHER 

among strangers; there Is no affec- 
tion except the mother's for her child 
that can creep so close in every 
trivial, tender detail of life. But can 
that love die, even if death is indeed 
the end of the individual, if even per- 
sonality shall vanish and be scat- 
tered like ashes to the wind? Is 
there not a kind of immortality in 
the power of the living to bestow? 
Does not memory forever work a 
miracle? 

The mulberry festival has com- 
menced this week, and in the soft 
airs of spring which blow the world 
away it seems as important an event 
as those more disturbing ones of 
which those strange agitated news- 
papers from the metropolis are full. 
I wonder if death is not a little like 
the southeast wind, that blows life 
away and yet leaves together those 
who have loved one another. 



91 



VI 



IT is the tradition of biographers, 
not quite so commonly of auto- 
biographers, that it is the faults of 
a character which make it human 
and living. I have always rather 
doubted this, though the doctrine 
gives one an agreeable excuse for 
pointing out the defects of others. 
Yet I mean to conform to the tradi- 
tion. As I remember my mother it 
is not bad qualities which stand out. 
Indeed, I am inclined to believe she 
was very good. But I shall do my 
best to blink at this goodness. 

My parent's persistent and out- 
standing fault was of being by nature 
and, so I affirmed, by intention late. 
She could not and she would not be 
on time. It was a necessity for her, 
but it was, too (so it seemed to a 
person like myself, passionately on 
time), always a pleasure. Not to be 
on time gives a person of my tem- 
perament a hurried, hunted feeling; 



92 



FOR MY MOTHER 

it gave her a sensation of ease. To 
be on time would have been to be a 
slave; to be late was to be master of 
your soul. 

It was a family tradition, my 
mother's lateness; it began, so the 
story went, at her birth. My grand- 
mother's birthday was on the 17th 
of January. My mother arrived on 
the i8th, just one day too late, my 
grandmother always said, to be a 
birthday gift. 

The gap between promise and per- 
formance was reduced as the good 
little Adelaide grew up; instead of a 
day late she was sometimes only a 
quarter or a half hour or even only 
ten minutes. But she was always 
late, bless her. 

My temper did not always stand 
the strain upon it. At such moments 
I used ironically to point out to her 
that she always caught trains, prov- 
ing that she could. And she an- 
swered, smilingly, that of course she 
could be on time for trains — ^one had 
to be. But one hadn't to be for one's 
son whom one loved. I asked her 
despairingly if my wishes could 



93 



A GIFT BOOK 

make promptness seem compulsory. 
I pointed out the inefficiency of 
wasting my valuable time by keeping 
me waiting. I begged her wildly to 
consider the wear and tear upon my 
nerves, the depletion of my vital 
energy. And she listened patiently, 
even tenderly — and was late next 
time. The nearest she ever came to 
making out a case for herself was once 
when she told me, with almost a 
touch of hauteur, that it was excel- 
lent discipline for me to control my 
nerves and that possibly she was 
doing me a real service in keeping 
me waiting. 

How can one ever know how many 
eccentricities of women are devised 
for the purpose of disciplining men, 
or how many times, when ladies are 
late, it is at the cost of considerable 
inconvenience to them, but for our 
good.? Such things are possible; 
such thoughts may lurk in the re- 
cesses of the female mind. This 
question of being on time is one 
which has divided the sexes from 
time immemorial. And the great 
logical advantage which the sex 



94 



FOR MY MOTHER 

which is late has over the one which 
is prompt is that they, quite obvi- 
ously, lose no time waiting. We, as 
a sex, are constantly in danger of 
being destroyed by the time we con- 
sume at restaurant entrances and in 
hotel lobbies. 

I gladly absolve my parent of 
any deep-seated plan to be late; it 
was indeed the lovely, instinctive 
flowering of her nature. My sister, 
who is herself no bad hand at not 
being ready, always maintained that 
mother had no sense of time. And I 
believe this was perhaps so, that she 
measured it only by the pleasure she 
was finding as it passed, or by the 
fatigue which indicated that some- 
how it must already have passed. 
And I detect here, in spite of my 
coarser masculine instinct for prompt- 
ness, the beginnings of a higher wis- 
dom, of a measurement of time by 
some higher standard than that of 
the gross mechanical pendulum. 

I used to assert that my mother's 
ideal would be to start to dress for 
dinner as dinner was announced, and 
she would reply, her eyes shining, 



95 



A GIFT BOOK 

that it would certainly be the way 
to eliminate waste of time. 

I dare say in her heart she ad- 
mitted that never to be on time was 
a fault. But she had too great a 
sense of humor to believe for an in- 
stant that it was a very grave fault. 
And what shall I say.? I started to 
prove her faults, but the first one I 
tackle now somehow looks engaging 
to me, and in a world where there is 
too little charm if a thing is engaging 
is it a fault.f* Even in one's mother? 

I think a sense of the proportionate 
value of things was at the heart of 
her wisdom. For I think that, with 
all her love of the sparkle of life, 
she was deliberate and wise. There 
are a few of her girlhood friends 
still who can talk to me about her. 
And the thing I like most to hear, 
aside from her having had the pret- 
tiest clothes, is that they all came 
to her for counsel, knowing that 
Addie had a sound common sense 
well poised amid the storms of their 
girlhood. 

Not that the storms were much. 
Girlhood was, 1 believe, a very sweet 



96 



FOR MY MOTHER 

and simple and natural thing in those 
days in America, and the problems 
brought to my mother that was to 
be were not of the kind which shake 
the world. I knew at the beginning 
that I was starting to write a chron- 
icle *'of small potatoes," as they 
would have said when my mother 
and my father were young. But I 
believe that the lives of so many 
good and happy people are mostly 
spent in dealing with these small 
potatoes. I believe, too, that out of 
the serene, clear sunshine of such a 
period in our national life came the 
strength and heroisms of the Civil 
War, And of something akin to this 
simplicity of young lives must come, 
I believe, the happiness of a more 
simple, more democratic, less luxuri- 
ous life in the future now. 

I remember being told of a visit 
to some Kentuck}?" cousins made 
when my mother was a quite young 
girl, before the war. A brother of 
my grandfather had, with some 
queer Connecticut eccentricity, set- 
tled there on the westward migra- 
tion instead of in northern Ohio. 



97 



A GIFT BOOK 

There was a white-pillared house 
that was set in a blooming garden, 
and the one night my mother loved 
to tell of was when by moonlight a 
band of young men and young ladies 
pelted one another with roses as if 
they were snowballing in the colder 
North. I think of that flowery, ro- 
mantic night as typical of all that 
serene period. Even then alarums and 
excursions were not far away. Uncle 
Augustus had been loyal to his 
Northern bringing-up, and there was 
a legend, delight of my boyhood, of 
how he had lain a week hidden from 
the Confederates in the shock of 
corn in one of his own fields, while 
by night one of my mother's girl 
cousins secretly brought him food. 
Such stories were the perquisite of 
little boys born in the 'seventies. 

I cannot remember many con- 
vincing anecdotes of my mother's 
girlhood wisdom, though I do re- 
member a delightful and terrific 
anecdote which, as girl and boy, my 
sister and I delighted to hear. I am 
a little vague about it, but I know it 
took place at a picnic and an exuber- 



98 



FOR MY MOTHER 

ant and delightful cousin — she is 
still, at eighty, all that — in what may 
seem an excess of girlish gayety, 
launched a piece of pie at a gentle- 
man with peculiarly glossy straw- 
colored whiskers. The anecdote had 
to deal, I believe, with the attitude 
apologetic or otherwise which the 
all-too-lively Sophia should have 
adopted, a matter upon which she at 
once sought Adelaide's advice. I 
ought, I know, to be chiefly inter- 
ested in that advice, but my mind 
has always dwelt rather on the pie- 
throwing itself, and as the movies 
came into vogue I was glad to see 
what an eternally sound comic value 
pie had. 

The picnic had taken place at Nel- 
son's Ledge, a favorite spot for such 
simple pleasures, where rocks broke 
picturesquely through the pretty 
northern Ohio woods and there were 
caves and dangerous almost moun- 
tainous paths — "lovers' lanes,'* no 
doubt. Picnics should never go out 
of vogue; they are typical of two 
pleasures of which no distracted con- 
dition of the world can ever deprive 



99 



A GIFT BOOK 

us — the happiness which comes from 
contemplating the beauties of nature 
and the gayety which wells as from 
the heart of youth when young men 
and women meet. 

Our fathers and mothers had less 
paraphernalia of pleasure than we 
of the generation after* them have 
had. It has to do, I suppose, with 
the history of American morals and 
with the attitude, perhaps, of the 
churches toward certain of the devil's 
devices. But there must have been 
a period in northern Ohio when 
dancing was out of vogue. My ma- 
ternal grandfather had been rather 
famous at it. At balls he had worn 
knee breeches, and it was evident 
from the way, even in old age, he 
spoke, that he "had had a leg." He 
talked of fiddlers, and of the tune of 
"Money Musk," and of balls in log 
cabins to which he went horseback 
on winter nights through wolf-in- 
fested woods, carrying his lady, gen- 
erally Maria Kent, whom he married 
when she was eighteen, behind him 
on a pillion. Is it not incredible 
that in northern Ohio pioneer and 

100 



FOR MY MOTHER 

colonial days lay so close behind us, 
who are not even yet quite superan- 
nuated in the world? My mother 
has been of another period. As a 
girl she does not seem to have 
danced. So it happened that she 
and my father learned to dance about 
the same time I as a child at dancing 
school did. I say *' learned" with 
hesitation about my father — he never 
really did. But my mother seemed 
to me to waltz especially with a 
quite ineffable grace and dignity. 
Their dancing class was in the 
evening in a house so magnificent as 
to have a ballroom where ordinary 
houses only had attics. And their 
season ended always with a fancy- 
dress evening. The excitement was 
for my sister and me intense. Once 
my mother wxnt as a Spanish girl, 
once as *' Night" with a great black 
tarlatan veil sewed thick with silver 
stars. (Didn't everybody's mother, 
in that Victorian day, go at least 
once as "Night," so sweetly and sym- 
bolically attired?) My father, who 
had suflFered torments at the idea of 
fancy dress, went both times as a 



lOI 



A GIFT BOOK 

monk. (Didn't embarrassed gentle- 
men for a whole century go so 
disguised?) 

That my mother and I were begin- 
ning to be dancers at about the same 
time was amusing. I owe what was 
my facility in the waltz to a great 
deal of practice at odd moments with 
her — if I had a minute before dinner 
was ready I waltzed to the dining 
room, an informal but pleasant com- 
radeship. 

Comradeship is what I would 
especially recommend to mothers 
anxious to win their children's hearts. 
Comrade is what my mother was — • 
to the end. Any recommendation of 
perfection is made with more hope- 
fulness to mothers than to their 
sons, because I humbly realize that, 
though I was perhaps a good son, she 
was always a better mother — ^per- 
haps the superiority of mothers is 
divinely implicit in their very ex- 
istence. My mother would have 
rewritten the Latin nihil humanum 
— -restricting it to merely that noth- 
ing that had to do with her children 
could ever be alien to her. 

102 



FOR MY MOTHER 

She wanted always to be with us, 
always to do the things we were 
doing, if they were consistent with 
her dignity of a mother. Yet she 
never gave us, nor anyone else, I 
think, the impression that she wanted 
to be young, only that she wanted to 
be with young people like her 
children. 

This was the real flattery with 
which she enchained us to her — ■ 
that she made us feel that we always 
held her interest. She rarely praised 
us; she never told me, Fm sure, 
that I was anything exceptional or 
wonderful, though I have suspected 
that to others she expressed a more 
exaggerated appreciation. But with 
us her tone was rather as if she never 
said we were anything wonderful 
because, considering the matter tem- 
perately, she knew we weren't, of 
course, but that, nevertheless, we 
interested and delighted her more 
than anyone else in the whole world; 
and if this were a weakness, a per- 
sonal idiosyncrasy, she felt sure we 
would forgive it. With such tactics 
she was of course irresistible. 



103 



A GIFT BOOK 

It Is a small thing, but we never 
sat through a meal in that silence 
which so often seems to grip families, 
people in strange hotels sometimes 
told us afterward that they had not 
supposed we could be related we 
seemed so interested in talking to 
one another. I would not convey 
the impression of anything chilling 
or formal. There was plenty of in- 
formality, and not always, I am 
afraid, at least on my part, very good 
manners. I am sometimes forgetful, 
and again often unduly proud of 
being a reasonable being and despis- 
ing les petits soins. I don't believe 
in gentlemen who lay stress on al- 
ways rising when their wives enter a 
room and then go home and beat 
them to a pulp. I say 1 like to be- 
lieve that I abound in a kindness 
beyond form. Mother, if she were 
here, would probably say again 
that I am like Eugene. This needs 
explanation. 

Eugene was a happy-natured ne- 
gro, now serving a term in stripes on 
the Florida roads because of an 
ingenious method of burglary he 



104 



FOR MY MOTHER 

practiced. He was engaged one day 
in trying to borrow two dollars from 
my mother. This was to help pay 
his fare to a mythical Babtown, New 
York, whence he claimed to have 
come. He dilated upon the tender 
feelings which drew him back, and 
finally in a climax depicted the ad- 
mirable family life he had led by 
saying: 

"Why, Mis' Rhodes, I had four- 
teen sisters and I never hit a one of 
them!" 

I agree with my mother that I am 
a little like that. I may have failed 
sometimes in courtliness of manners 
to her and to my sister, but I really 
never hit a one of them. 

Talking and writing are, I sup- 
pose, what I have chiefly been con- 
cerned with in life. And I know I 
talked my best for my mother. She 
never failed of giving me that ulti- 
mate flattery of being a good audi- 
ence. And I know that, however 
poor a proof of her intelligence it 
may be, her interest in what I might 
have to say was at least fresher and 
more genuine than anyone else's. 



los* 



A GIFT BOOK 

But for all this, I think I felt all 
along that she expected not to be put 
off with anything short of my best 
in thought and speech. I think, with 
all the perfect informality and inti- 
macy she made both her children 
feel that being with her was a social 
event, and that because she preferred 
our society to any other she expected 
us to do what we could to justify her 
in this odd choice. If I have made 
myself in the least clear, I have, I 
believe, told one of the secrets I 
would like to tell to sons and mothers. 
The assistance which my mother 
could give me in my trade of writing 
was chiefly as a critic of English 
style, and if I dwell upon her taste 
in the language it is not because I 
think her services to me bulk large 
in the cosmos, but because I think 
it is agreeable and significant that a 
daughter of Solon could render them. 
She had not been brought up in a 
reading community, nor educated, 
either at the village school or later 
at the Eclectic Institute at Little 
Hiram on the hill, much beyond 
what is the ordinary high-school 

1 06 



FOR MY MOTHER 

standard of to-day. But I think 
that the famous power of adaptation 
of the American woman is partly a 
certain sense of personal fastidious- 
ness, a kind of uncultivated distinc- 
tion of mind which is implicit in 
American blood of the old stock, 
which comes almost unconsciously 
into play if any attempt at literary 
criticism is demanded. I don't 
know whether my mother remem- 
bered any rules about split infini- 
tives, but she would have been 
vaguely irritated by the presence of 
one in my writing, and in subtler 
less codified questions of taste she 
was quite sure to be right. 

She belonged, of course, to a gener- 
ation which had an impassioned 
belief in education and an almost 
childish reverence for the great 
achievements of the mind. My 
father had had an exuberant delight 
in literature — he plunged about in 
it with loud cries, rather like a boy 
enjoying the surf. But his taste, as 
masculine taste should perhaps be, 
was a little riotous. He, too, had 
been a writer, his chief achievement 



107 



A GIFT BOOK 

having been a series of letters from 
Europe to the Cleveland paper, in 
that happy age when the simple 
transatlantic trip was a great ad- 
venture for Ohio and one could in- 
dulge oneself to the full in descrip- 
tions of the Strand or the Boule- 
vard des Italiens, sure that to one's 
readers they would seem new and 
wonderful. 

Again 1 am struck with the great 
part of American history which is 
the story of the effect of Europe, and 
am glad that in my parents as well 
as in myself I saw its workings. We 
have perhaps come now into a period 
which will rather be of the effect of 
America on Europe. And if we as a 
nation are in danger of being too 
proud of the benefits we are about 
to confer upon that continent, it 
would be well to remember in some 
humility what we and our parents 
and our grandparents derived from 
over there. 

I believe it gives a certain tonic 
quality to life, as well as a sense of 
standing on foundations, to realize 
how in ourselves there are traits of 

1 08 



FOR MY MOTHER 

those who have gone before. And 
now, almost more than ever, it is well 
that we should all think occasionally 
of our parents and our grandparents 
in order that we may more self- 
consciously be American and add to 
our own sense of obligation toward 
the world — if happily we feel that — 
the sense of the country's debt to 
other countries. It makes for na- 
tionalism and internationalism at the 
same time, which paradoxical goal 
is really aimed at by the most gener- 
ous-hearted to-day, is it not? 

But I am perhaps venturing far 
afield, since I was trying only to tell 
something of the pleasant intimacy 
there may be between a mother and 
her children. 

I know what I got out of being a 
son. I can, after all, only conjecture 
what her rewards were for being a 
mother. One thing, for example, the 
child is given, is the sense of being 
young; he is, after all, always young 
to her, even as his hair grows gray. 
But does his mother have the com- 
plementary feeling that she is always 
old, and does this sense deepen and 

109 



A GIFT BOOK 

become oppressive as real old age 
slowly creeps on her? At how much 
of inner sacrifice of herself does she 
buy for her child his eternal youth? 
What is the inner truth, told only in 
the inner chamber of a woman's soul, 
about the happiness that comes from 
sacrifice? There is not much sacri- 
fice about being a child, even a 
fairly affectionate and kind child. 
But the potential sacrifices of those 
who bear us are without limit. 

With my mother went my youth. 
I do not say this to ask any sym- 
pathy. I do not mean even to assert 
that it is a sad thing. I only observe 
it as a thing which I had not known 
was bound to happen to me, though 
I now suppose it happens to every- 
one. I do not feel that there is now 
anyone much older than I am in all 
the world. I have, at any rate, 
grown up at last; I am wholly re- 
sponsible for myself. As a matter of 
fact, I have been wholly responsible 
for years, and I have almost never 
asked advice. So that it is perhaps 
being alone that I mean instead of 
being old. 

no 



FOR MY MOTHER 

We never talked of the possibility 
of death for her. I suppose we did 
not much think of it. If that were 
to inhabit a fool's paradise, I really 
cannot see much that could have 
been gained by facing the inevitable. 
Perhaps, though, she faced it, and 
faced it alone — and that this is part 
of the measureless tragedy and sac- 
rifice of motherhood, to hide from 
one's children the coming of the day 
when they must be left alone. 

I can only remember one occasion 
when she spoke of the possibility of 
death to me. As she grew older it 
seemed as if a swarm of minor weak- 
nesses and ailments buzzed about her, 
and pain seemed to be always lurk- 
ing, ready to pounce upon her tired 
body. Pain grew not to be so much 
unbearable as, in one form or an- 
other, continuous. That I am sure is 
what happens to old people as they 
go to ruin. I suppose we younger 
people do not understand. This 
once she was a little tired, and so 
told me that she sometimes wondered 
whether, if the pains grew greater, it 
would really be much pleasure to 

III 



A GIFT BOOK 

live. I assured her almost lightly 
that it would be, and we dropped the 
subject. But I wonder sometimes 
whether it is not easy to bear an- 
other's pain. 

It would be perhaps too much to 
ask of a mother to live into too much 
pain and too many years. Yet there 
is not much children do not ask. 
And nothing mothers do not try to 
give. I am sure she would have 
tried to live forever, for our sake. 



112 



VII 

IT is a very common thing to say 
that the edge of grief wears dull 
with years, and that it is a blessed 
thing. Perhaps it wears dull, per- 
haps it is blessed that it should be, 
if it is so. I am still at the stage of 
wondering. 

The paroxysms pass, both mind 
and body fall back into something of 
the old routine activities. Life is 
not intolerable without those who 
have gone. But it is forever different. 

Life is for most of us rather like a 
picture which composes around cer- 
tain personalities. When one has 
grown old enough to be used to the 
picture the blotting out of one of its 
chief elements seems to make what 
is left ill composed and meaningless. 
The significance of half the minor 
events, of the trivial gayeties, of the 
small jokes, of all the detail of every- 
day life which made it bearable, is 
gone without my mother's answering 



113 



A GIFT BOOK 

gleam in the eye, her pleasant passing 
comment. 

Of course we try to keep her with 
us (we do this only half consciously, 
I think) by bursting forth about 
many a small and absurd event that 
it is a shame that she should be 
missing it. It is in the minor hap- 
penings of life that one misses an 
absent comrade. In the great crises, 
in the moments of great happiness 
or of great suffering, one is somehow 
willing to stand alone. It is when 
the laundress has said something 
amusing about the condition of my 
underwear that I want to share the 
fun with my mother. 

Without the comradeship of one 
who has been a gay dear friend the 
w^orld's events seem to fall into new 
and perhaps wiser valuations. That, 
it seems to me, is something of what 
people mean by the lesson of sorrow, 
the greater sympathy which one 
wins by suffering, merely that one 
sees that few things have much im- 
portance beyond what comradeship 
gives them. In a revalued world it 
is not so hard as it once was to go 

114 



FOR MY MOTHER 

without things. The deeply and 
genuinely bereaved man is the se- 
rener for his loss. He is, so long as 
his memory lasts of the beautiful 
thing he has lost, poised somehow 
above the minor good and evil of the 
world. He has less wish to live and 
so less fear to die, through a greater 
willingness to do either, as fate shall 
decide. 

For most people, I think, the ques- 
tion of immortality only arises really 
from the grave of some dead loved 
one. And life, at any rate, takes on 
a new and solemn interest. The sun 
never again sets in somber glory 
without asking you to contemplate 
the world as something which may 
be a mere veil. If eyes that once 
looked at us with love are looking 
at the odd pattern of human life 
from the other side, we must at least 
hope that it seems to them better 
designed than it sometimes appears 
to us. 

The question of the life after death 
would take more than one little book, 
as it has already taken its thousand 
thousands. Here there is not wisdom 



"5 



A GIFT BOOK 

or science enough to make even one 
chapter. But I do know that be- 
cause love has gone there is no ruin 
of the beauty of love which has 
been. Every great human affection 
is immortal; so, perhaps, is every 
smallest. Memory is the miracle 
worker. If you can remember the 
dead with a heart passionate enough, 
they do not die at least until you so 
go yourself. And then if you, too, 
sleep eternally, shall they not sleep 
as well ? 

There was in our garden a red 
climbing rose which my mother had 
planted and then despaired of be- 
cause it would never bloom. It 
grew riotously, and upon wires strung 
for it between the fig trees it clam- 
bered almost the whole length of the 
croquet court. But for four years or 
more it never showed traces of 
flowering, and my mother had finally 
condemned it. That last autumn 
she told me that if in the coming 
spring it still refused to blossom it 
was to be removed from the garden, 
and a more docile bush set in its place. 

She died in January, and in April 

ii6 



FOR MY MOTHER 

the Hiawatha rose flowered for the 
first time, a blaze of scarlet and 
gold, as she had meant it should be. 
It has not blossomed since. Was it 
a signal? It is not altogether pre- 
posterous to me. There is something 
which, every gardener knows, makes 
plants grow, not sun nor soil nor 
rain, but something the gardener 
himself brings to the garden. If 
anything could know that she wan- 
dered down the old paths it would 
perhaps be a rose bush. I had rather 
that it had been one of her children. 
But I disdain no hint that the rose 
is my brother and that the whole 
shining green world is bound to- 
gether in some confraternity of love 
beyond my power to apprehend. If 
moods come when the comrade I 
have liked most still seems for me 
to live in the budding bush and the 
southeast wind and the redbird's 
twinkling song, why, then, I am 
glad. 



THE END 



"7 



